Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time
St Peter’s Eastern Hill, July 9th 2023
Because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.
Our Lord has a special affinity with children. Today, when he speaks of them, he seems to be holding them up as a mirror to the whole crowd that surrounds him. He does this, not once, but twice.
In the first instance, he compares the whole generation to children sitting in a market-place. He conjures up this scene of the children complaining, having played flutes cheerfully one minute, the next minute sung laments. Maybe they were playing to earn a few coins or breadcrumbs. In any case, no one actually entered into the spirit of the song. They watched one another’s performance with eyebrows raised—unconvinced. Our Lord says this is what his whole generation is like when it comes to piety. They look John the Baptist and say, You’re mad. They look at Jesus and say, You’re profligate. They won’t let themselves be moved by John’s penance. They won’t let themselves be embraced by our Lord. It is like John sent out a note of mourning and no one took it to heart. Then our Lord sent out a note of joy and no one joined in his song. They are “too clever” for piety.
Now this is but one side of the picture of our Lord’s generation. We also hear that there were crowds flocking out to be baptised by John. The “sinners” who ate gladly with the Lord were moved and were also part of his generation.
But it is a recognisable tendency, isn’t it? One comes face-to-face with another’s piety, and it is easier to raise one’s eyebrows than to let oneself be moved. It is easier to be sceptical than sincere. We can see it in our own generations, and maybe at times in ourselves. We often don’t want to be drawn out of ourselves and succumb to another’s influence, be it in the life of prayer or the living out of Faith. I think it is this kind of tendency our Lord is pointing to. And it’s like acid in the life of faith. Because the very essence of faith is to be moved by the Other.
Now I wonder we might compare the childish children in the marketplace, to “infants”. (I don’t know about you, but I prefer the word ‘toddler’, so let’s go with that.) When we think about the behaviour of a toddler, toddlers are very readily moved. More often than not, they mirror the emotions they see around them. If you show a toddler a face in distress, they get distressed; if you giggle, they giggle. I have noticed this particularly when young ones fall over. If they haven’t seriously hurt themselves, they look up at you with a kind of question. If they see panic on your face, they wail. Whereas they are far more likely to bounce back if you smile and reassure them. It is part of how each of us has learnt to be human, isn’t it? We hear the melody and we go with it. We share the lament. We rejoice. We mirror what we see in the people around us.
I wonder if this could tell us something about our Lord revealing God to “toddlers”, “infants”. It is a personal knowledge of he is speaking of; he is talking about the character of God: “No one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” Such knowledge can only come through our perception of a person. The Son of God. He is our window into our Creator, the Cause and the End of all things, come to impress his nature on our souls.
We come to know God our Father, by mirroring what we see in him. The way a toddler will mirror the ways you react, and speak, and act: such is our relationship with our Lord. We are to let our inner worlds be shaped by him. His gentleness. His attentiveness. His eating with the black sheep. His loyalty to God the Father. His choosing mercy even when faced with eyes of judgement. Like all intimate knowledge, it is circular. The more I live like him, the better I understand him. The better I understand him, the more he influences me.
It is not an easy thing to do in adulthood, to keep referring and deferring to Someone outside yourself. I know I have my moments when I think as if I have integrated all the heavenly wisdom I need to, and only have to wait for the rest of the world to catch up with me! But in the end: I cannot be my own moral centre of gravity. I am a creature. Still being moved. Still being moulded. I need a reference point outside myself. Thanks be to God, he has given one to us in Jesus Christ. ‘Come to me,’ and, ‘learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls.’
St Augustine of Hippo, commenting on this passage, points out that the higher and grander you want to build a building, the deeper you need to dig the foundations. The height to which the Christian seeks to attain is the vision of God. The desire to see God and to know him is the heartbeat of Christian life. It is what we understand heaven to mean and to be. If one is to reach that high, one needs first to dig a very deep foundation of humility. The path of faith is a humbling one. To be learning how to be again and still for the rest of our life. But when the stakes are so high, whether we have ten years or ten minutes left to us here, it will always be worth being moved again by what we see in our Lord—in the Scriptures, in the Liturgy, in his Church. To repent when we are given cause for repentance. To rejoice, when we come face to face with the Lord of joy.
I’d like to conclude with these words from a Coptic Orthodox preacher, Fr Moses Samaan:
“Weakness in a Christian sense is not acceptance of our sins, such as when a person tries to justify his sins by saying, “I am only human.” Rather, weakness in a Christian sense is the awareness that we cannot achieve the greatness to which we are called unless God helps us. […] When we see ourselves as we really are, Christ Himself comes and completes within us what is lacking. This is what He did in His Incarnation and this is what He continues to do in our own lives.”
It is this, Christ guiding the plough, that actually makes our burdens light.
Mthr Kathryn