Things Hidden From The Learned And The Cleaver, But Revealed To Children
Our Gospel reading today is one of the magnificent texts in Matthew. It’s one of the great revelations in the synoptic Gospels. We are accustomed to seeing it in John, but we’re not as accustomed to seeing this depth of mystery revealed in the synoptic Gospels. To start with, we’ve seen in Luke that Jesus is at prayer. We have even heard the disciples say to him, “Lord, John taught his disciples to pray. Teach us to pray.” Then he taught them the Our Father. So we’ve seen him teaching prayer, but there are only two times where we actually hear the prayer that he prays while he’s praying, and this is one of the times. The second time is at the in Gethsemane when he prays, “Father take this cup away from me, but not my will, but your will be done. So we have him teaching the Our Father, we have him praying in Gethsemane, and we have Him praying here, and the three texts are very deeply connected.
Jesus exclaimed, “I bless you Father, Lord of heaven and on earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever, and revealing them to mere children. Yes, Father for that is what it pleased you to do.”
Do you think that you have an inkling into the revelations of God? Do you think you have an inkling into the mind of God right now, and what God is doing in the world? Well, then you must be ‘learned and clever.’ The text is driving at something, and to understand this text, you have to understand what came before it. So our text last week was the last of the discipleship missionary text, where he was sending them out to go and proclaim the gospel. Just before this text, we have the two cities around Galilee that had rejected Jesus and his message completely, Chorazin and Bethsaida, where he said, “Woe to you Chorazin! Woe to you Bethsaida! If the miracles that had been done in you were done in Sodom and Gomorrah, they would have repented!”
So we have a total rejection of the message of Jesus, and of the message of the Kingdom of God. In the light of that rejection, when he has brought these ‘woes’ onto these cities, the next thing that he does is turn his eyes to the Father, and he blesses the Father, the Lord of Heaven and Earth who has revealed these things to the little ones but hid them from the learned and the clever.
