God's Own People

Homily for Wednesday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time

In the Gospels, Jesus often surprises his listeners by turning contemporary values upside down. When Jesus claims that the poor are blessed, that it is better to be hated because of him than to be praised by all, or that it will be hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven, he is shocking many of the people of his culture. Often in the Lord’s preaching, he teaches the exact opposite of what the prevailing wisdom of the day declares.

In the short passage that we have from the Gospel of St. Matthew today, Jesus praises his Father, declaring that God has hidden the truth from the wise and the learned and revealed it to the childlike. Any scholars or teachers or scribes or Pharisees in the crowd must have wondered where Jesus got such crazy ideas. In this ancient culture, they tended to listen to scholars and ignored children. However, him with his trail is reap with instances in which the people failed to listen to those God sent to them. Perhaps that is why most of the people who followed Jesus were uneducated people, fishermen, shepherds, men with a trade – the common folk. Why would God reveal the truth to such a rabble and sinners, at least those considered to be sinners by the learned and scholarly Pharisees.

Yet, if we look at the history of God’s self-revelation, we recognize immediately that God chose the most unlikely people to be prophets. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, the only prophet that was heeded, the only one who was successful in turning the people away from their sinful way of lives, was Jonah. Unfortunately for the children of Israel, Jonah was not sent to them. He was sent to the Gentiles of Nineveh. They demonstrated great humility in the reception of what Jonah made known to them.

The clearest, most visible, most tangible revelation of God’s love was in the person of Jesus Christ, the Son who was both human and divine. He was the only one who could show them the Father, and he was the only one through whom they could come to know the Father. If they couldn’t see Jesus for who he was, how could they ever know his Father.

It is when we are most vulnerable and humble, most childlike, that we are most open and receptive to God’s self-revelation in the Word made flesh who embodied both the grace and the truth that is God. The gift of faith must be received with humility, with childlike wonder, and with the fear of the Lord. None of us are part of the rabble, but we are all sinners. Through God’s gracious will we each have been chosen as one of God’s own.