Moira and I made a pact with each other when we got married: she would come with me to steam railways and I would go with her to dance performances. I can say that, since then, Moira has consistently refused to learn about such fascinating subjects as locomotive valve gear, single-line working or facing-point locks (I can’t imagine why) while I have learned a lot about dance and have even managed to make some sensible or critical comments about it. However Moira has totally failed in one aspect of her ambition for me: she has never managed to persuade me to dance myself. That’s because I’m self-conscious, uncoordinated and find it impossible to remember even the simplest sequence of steps – saying that I have two left feet is only the start of my difficulties. So I prefer to leave dancing to the experts!

People who wouldn’t dance figure in today’s intriguing passage, with Jesus likening some of his hearers to children who first heard happy wedding music but didn’t dance, then funeral dirges but didn’t cry. The setting is a deserted market-place; today we might prefer to locate it in a school playground at breaktime. A group of children is making up little plays, one about a wedding, another about a funeral, complete with music. They’d love their peers to join in but they refuse; they’re caught up in looking at their mobile phones and can’t be bothered to connect with what’s happening around them. The playful children are shocked and upset by this rudeness and abrupt rejection.

This has been called a “delightful parable” (it can also be found, in a slightly different form, in Luke’s Gospel) – but what is its context? Well, Jesus is talking about the responses that given to John the Baptist’s ministry and his own. While we know that both preachers, whether John in the desert by the river Jordan or Jesus as he trekked (or sailed!) from village to village, were hugely popular and drew big crowds, we also know that they did not meet with universal approval. Many folk from the religious “establishment” made it clear that they disapproved of such maverick, uneducated and populist characters, peddling new and (as they thought) heretical views of God; they made it their business to silence them. But I don’t think these are the people that Jesus is speaking about here. He’s talking about ordinary folk who found plenty of reasons to criticise him and John; reasons they used as a pretext for dismissing and ignoring them – which hurt.

For when John came as an ascetic living on locusts and wild honey – he wasn’t one for the high life! – they didn’t just say that he was a bit odd but that he was demon-possessed. The fact that he was reviving an established Old Testament prophetic tradition didn’t seem to occur to them; perhaps they felt critiqued and judged by his austere lifestyle and uncompromising message. If they could find a reason to ignore him, they would. Jesus was of course very different: he was a sociable person who enjoyed his food and drink. But that wouldn’t do either as far as these curmudgeons were concerned: for how could a man who purported to be holy be so like everyone else? So they branded him a glutton and drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and ‘sinners’, the kind of people with whom “decent people” most certainly did not fraternise. Once again these critics had managed, as they saw it, to find fault with God’s messenger and could therefore ignore him. Jesus was clearly an irreligious imposter, but they’d seen through him; or so they thought!

The inference of this unfamiliar parable isn’t that these listeners were lazy or unfeeling, but that they were stony-hearted and unresponsive. They’d failed to react to John’s teaching on sin and repentance, they’d failed to welcome the glad tidings about God brought by Jesus. Unlike the Jewish academics I mentioned earlier, these people didn’t engage in discussion or argument but remained infuriatingly disengaged. When crowds streamed out to hear John, they stayed stubbornly at home; when Jesus performed amazing miracles for all to see, they showed no interest. You can imagine John and Jesus wanting to give them a good shake to see if, in fact, they were breathing and alive!

So who were these terrible folk? They were simply the inhabitants of Capernaum, Chorazin and Bethsaida, nondescript fishing villages in Galilee (from which, as it happens, most of Jesus’ disciples had come). These places weren’t notorious for corruption nor were they hotbeds of prostitution, devil worship or some other evil; yet Jesus denounces them in pretty fiery language as being worse than Tyre and Sidon, Philistine cities which had often been the targets of Old Testament prophets’ censure, and Sodom, a byword for iniquity. So what was his complaint? It was simply that the folk who lived in these places were lethargic whingers. He had preached and healed or, as Matthew says, performed acts of power; yet these people remained uninterested and unmoved. All they wanted to do was catch fish.

This was a problem faced by Jesus throughout his ministry. We know that, after Jesus had told the parable of the man who went out to sow seed, his disciples asked, “Why do you teach in parables?” – implying that their meanings weren’t always obvious. Jesus’ answer, quoting freely from the prophet Isaiah, is that people see (but don’t really see) and hear (but don’t actually understand). They have ceased thinking, closed their eyes and stopped up their ears. Jesus presumably uses parables to engage them and make them think. But the attempt is fruitless, they can’t be bothered, they are too set in their ways. Paul uses the same quotation, years later, when he speaks to the Jewish community after finally arriving in Rome; he is so disgusted by their intransigence that he says, “Right; I’ve done what I can for you but it’s a total waste of time. I’m off to preach to the Gentiles – they’ll listen!”

So how might this little story relate to us today? Well, I think it can help us think about three different groups of people. The first is the large number of folk outside the Church who haven’t really thought about our faith but have worked out “pat” answers for rejecting it if the topic should ever come up. These might include “Religion is all in the mind” or “The Bible is full of errors” or “Religion has caused all the wars in the world” or “Science has disproved Christianity”. They might add other remarks such as “Christians are all hypocrites” or “The Church is full of abusers and will do anything to protect them”.

Now these comments do, in some cases sadly, contain grains of truth. But, all too often, the people who make them haven’t thought them through but have just picked them up at the pub, from a tabloid newspaper or through social media. Nevertheless they use them as “clobber arguments” to close down any conversation about religion if it seems to be becoming at all personal. There’s no real knowledge behind what they’re saying, but there doesn’t need to be: their remarks allow whatever they hear or see about Jesus and Christianity to be ignored or rejected without further ado. I’m sure that God is saddened when people spurn his outstretched hand of grace after giving careful consideration to what he is offering them; he must be angered by people who say “no” without making the slightest effort to listen to him.

We can extend this to a second group of folk, who may be inside or outside the Church but who all exhibit the same trait: a refusal to listen to reality, possibly because doing so might oblige them to make inconvenient changes in their life-style. I’m thinking of people who (for example, but I could have chosen other issues) deny that global warming is happening, who may declare – based merely on Internet rumour or tabloid journalism – that the scientific analysis and predictions are, at best, flimsy or, at worst, a malign conspiracy hatched up by world leaders or multinational companies. You can try to reason with such people, you can attempt to present them with carefully-garnered evidence, but it’s pointless as they just won’t listen. Why should they take the bus instead of the car, why should they holiday in Britain rather than on the other side of the world, when China is still building coal-fired power stations? In this context, “every little helps” cuts no ice whatsoever. Their minds are closed.

Finally – and this, I think, takes us back to John and Jesus in a very pertinent way – we must think about professing Christians who are experts in avoiding interaction with the Bible or sensing the “nudges” of God’s Spirit. They may come to church every week, they may even be quite active in some of the practical aspects of church life. But there’s a deadness about them, a lack of spiritual vitality which they dismiss as “it’s what you do that’s important, not what you believe”. In fact they’re reluctant to talk about their faith at all (and never get involved in Bible studies or house groups), possibly because they’ve never advanced beyond what they half-remember from Sunday School all those years ago and don’t want their ignorance to be exposed.

These folk – and I’m not saying that we have any in this church! – are thorns in any Minister’s side. When changes are proposed, they’ll reject them and cling to tradition because “that’s what we stand for”; when debates take place about Christian morals and values in today’s society they’ll be the first to close down the discussion by saying, “We must stick to our principles” or, “You’re out to undermine Scripture”; when new approaches to outreach are suggested they’ll quickly state, “There’s no point in trying that, it will never work”. These are people of whom it might be said, “Come weal or woe, my status is quo”. The Minister may preach with passion, but the responses offered by these intransigent folk are always negative. Like Jesus, the Minister despairs.

As I’ve said, Jesus condemned the inhabitants of those three villages in wildly extravagant terms. That was because they’d had more opportunities than most to see Jesus in action, yet resolutely failed to believe or even take notice. But let’s not be too quick to pat ourselves on the back and say, “We’d never do that”. For God may confound our expectations by working in strange and mysterious ways which, based on our theology, tradition or past experience, we are far more likely to reject than embrace. Many Christians, whether they call themselves Evangelical or Liberal, say that their minds are open to God speaking in new ways, giving them fresh understandings, or propelling them into avenues of service they had never contemplated. That’s what they say; but the reality is very different: their minds are, in fact, closed.

Someone who has reflected upon this is Pope Francis. In a homily he gave soon after his election, he talked about “the drama of the closed heart and of the closed mind. When the heart is closed, this heart closes the mind, and when the heart and mind are closed there is no place for God”. Thinking of those in the Bible who rejected Jesus or the Old Testament prophets, he went on, “It is a closed way of thinking that is not open to dialogue, to the possibility that there is something else, the possibility that God speaks to us, tells us about his journey, as he did to the prophets. It is something greater than mere stubbornness:: it is the idolatry of their own way of thinking. ‘I think this, it has to be this way, and nothing more’. These people had a narrow line of thought … Jesus rebukes them for this”. Francis closed by warning about  the dangers of such an attitude on wider society: “When this phenomenon of narrow thinking enters human history, how many misfortunes ensue. We all saw in the last century, the dictatorships of narrow thought, which ended up killing a lot of people, but when they believed they were the overlords, no other form of thought was allowed. This is the way they think”. Wise words indeed!

We began by talking about the way that many people received – or, should we say, failed to receive – both John and Jesus. Let’s close by turning the clock forward a few years, to the time when the infant Church was “making waves” by its miraculous exploits and forthright preaching. This wasn’t welcomed by the Jewish authorities, not least because they were jealous of the attention the Christians were getting. They summoned Peter and the other apostles in order to give them a good ticking-off, but they refused to stand down and continued to declare the heresy of Jesus being the Messiah. The Council members were so enraged at the apostles’ stubbornness that they wanted them put to death. However the atmosphere was defused when one of their number, a man named Gamaliel, had the courage to put his head above the parapet and speak. He told his colleagues to be careful and to leave the Christians alone. The new sect might prove to be a short-lived flash in the pan, but it might – just possibly – God as its source. Surely the Council wouldn’t want to find itself fighting against him!

Well, those Jewish elders were hostile to the Christian message. But at least they reacted to it. The people living in those lakeside villages didn’t respond at all; they were apathetic, uninterested, indifferent. And – as any minister who has tried to rouse their congregation, any teacher who has attempted to stimulate a discussion, any chair who has sought to start a debate will tell you – that is even worse.

So what about us? Are we ever in danger of ignoring God, of refusing to dance to his tune? I’m pretty sure that we are, and quite often. For dancing means listening to the music’s rhythm and connecting with it, dancing means getting up and moving, dancing means spending some of our precious time and energy, dancing may mean copying a teacher who is telling us what to do, dancing may mean overcoming self-consciousness and embarrassment. I’ll probably never learn to dance in the physical sense; but I hope that, when the Holy Spirit plays his flute, I’ll not only hear it but willingly follow its rhythm.