REVEALED TO MERE CHILDREN

HOMILY FOR THE 14^TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (YEAR A)

Rev. Fr. Peter Onyekachi Ezekoka

Zechariah 9:9-10        Romans 8:9, 11-13        Matthew 11:25-30

Every generation, including ours, has its privileges. These privileges are accepted and taken advantage of by some, and are ignored or abused by others. There is no greater privilege afforded to us than that of knowing God personally, and of ploughing on in the hope of seeing Him face to face because He is the One who leads us to the Father. That privilege has been afforded to all generations of the past 2000 years by Jesus Christ Who, in putting an end to the eschatological mediation, is simultaneously the sole mediator of the New Covenant (Heb 9:15; 12:24) and the revealer par excellence of God to humanity. No one can go the Father except through the Christ (Jn 14:6). Looking at some of Jesus’ contemporaries, we find among them (cf. Mt 11:16-27) those who declined to accept the astonishing privilege afforded to their generation. Christ described these people as petulant and childish.

In today’s Gospel, which contains an excerpt of Jesus’ proclamation of His Messiahship, our Lord offers thanksgiving and praise to God the Father for what has been revealed to ‘mere children’ but remains hidden from ‘the learned and the clever’. It’s clear that these ‘mere children’ are not the same as those childish children referred to at the beginning of the chapter in Matthew. To understand who these ‘mere children’ identified by Jesus are, a comparison of them with those referred to as ‘learned and clever’ may be helpful.

The learned and the clever are those who are blinded to God’s truth, blinded to God’s will of bringing salvation through His Son Jesus, and blinded to the fact that Jesus was-and-is the Messiah, the mediator and the revealer of the true nature of God the Father to us. In the economy of salvation, Jesus is God-as-He-is-for-us – He reveals the fullness of God as far as we can grasp Him with our limited human understanding. Those who choose instead to rely solely on intellect and brain-power are, as St. Paul said, darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart (Eph 4:18). He goes on to say that they have become callous and have given themselves up to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of uncleanness. And who were these ‘learned and clever’ people in the context of today’s Gospel? They were those religious leaders and scribes who perceived themselves to be the lords and masters of the Law. They found it unreasonable to accept that God had chosen to come to them in a lowly manner, born in Bethlehem and raised in the Northern hamlet of Nazareth rather than in the capital city of Jerusalem, a humble tradesman. 

And so, they looked down on Jesus. I’m afraid, we repeat their errors when we today look down on others because of where they come from, how they appear, and what they do (their jobs). Not one of them was prepared to pick up and run with the fulfilment of the prophecy before their very eyes that your king comes to you…humble and riding on a donkey (Zech. 9:9). Seeing themselves as wise, intelligent, self-satisfied, and resting on their glittering abilities and achievements, they become blinded to what was really going on. The revelation of God eludes anybody who is ‘puffed up’ by their knowledge (1Cor 8:1) because know-alls tend to put love, mercy and charity on the back burner. I hope that, by cultivating the virtue of humility, we will all continue to do our utmost to avoid finding ourselves in that group so that we do not forfeit heaven.

The mere children are those who genuinely place their full trust in God. Because they willingly and deliberately surrender themselves to His will (1Jn 2:3-6), they are receptive and teachable, and they grow in holiness. They are the ones to whom the secrets of the Kingdom of God are revealed (Mt 13:10-11), because they not only accept the revelation of God through Jesus with a listening ear (Lk 11:28) and an open heart (Eph 1:18), but they go on to act on it (Jas 1:22). They are the ones who, in the words of St. Paul in the Second Reading,  possess the Spirit of God. They live in grace because they surrender their Pride and their self-will in favour of God’s Law and do what God wants of them. And who exactly are ‘they’? These ‘mere children’ are the ‘little children’ (Jn 13:33) – the disciples of Jesus. Seeing themselves correctly as those in need of God’s mercy, and relying at every moment upon God’s grace, they humble themselves and make themselves obedient to the teachings revealed by God (Jas 1:21). They imitate Jesus, their Lord and their God (cf. Jn 20:28) who is meek and humble in heart (Mt 11:29). without looking down on people, they relate with all peoples as they would with anybody.

And finally… it is the heart rather than the head that is the home of the Gospel. The gifts of intelligence and brilliance do not shut someone out of God’s Kingdom; what does exclude a person is the sin of Pride, involving the misuse and twisting of these gifts. The burdens of dullness of intellect or plain stupidity do not admit someone to God’s Kingdom; what does admit a person is the grace of humility. A person may be as wise as Solomon, but if they lack humility, innocence and a childlike heart, they shut themselves off from the possibility of entering the Kingdom of God. As we meditate on these words and make them our own, we pray that we may become one of these ‘mere children’ of whom our Lord Jesus spoke. Amen. God bless you.