Childlike Receptivity to God’s Revelation, 15th Wednesday (II), July 15, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 15th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Bonaventure, Bishop and Doctor
July 15, 2020
Is 10:5-7.13-16, Ps 94, Mt 11:25-27

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily:

• Today’s Gospel allows Jesus to continue to guide us as to the good soil about which he spoke to us on Sunday as well as to how we’re supposed to learn from the mistakes of Capernaum, Chorazin and Bethsaida in order to receive him and his saving work into our life and to understand the receptivity others will show to us when we are seeking to proclaim the Gospel in Jesus’ name. Jesus describes that it is the will of the Father to reveal himself to us and to others, but there are three conditions to our and others’ receptivity to God’s self-revelation.
• First, God the Father reveals himself to us in his Son as the Son reveals himself to us by through the Father. Jesus tells us, “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.” The way we come to know God the Father and the depth of his ardent love is through Jesus’ choosing to reveal him to us. We rejoice that he has so chosen to reveal him to us. Jesus is the icon of the Father and also speaks not only of the Father but also what he hears the Father saying. His whole mission on earth was to help us not only come to know the Father but to enter into loving communion with him, as Jesus teaches us by word and example to relate to him as “Our Father” and to seek to hallow his name, enter into his kingdom, and do his will.
• Second, to receive this revelation we must do so not just through some generic spiritual childhood but by entering into Jesus’ spiritual childhood. Jesus joyfully exclaims in prayer, “I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike.” We can’t get to know the Father as Father unless we see ourselves not just as children but specifically as hischildren — and we do that in Jesus. The wise and the clever of this world try to pretend as “grown-ups,” who say, “Thanks, but I’ve got it from here,” who want to be self-sufficient rather than dependent on the Father, who behave like the sons in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the first of whom treats the Father as if he is as good as dead to him and no longer needed, and the second treats him more as a slave master than as a dad. To receive the revelation of the Father, we need to be open like children, we need to be receptive and trusting, we need to learn from Jesus, who is not only the revelation of the Father but also the revelation of how to relate to the Father as a beloved Son in whom the Father is well pleased. When Jesus describes the “wise and the clever,” we should note, he’s not castigating intelligence but intellectual pride. We see this type of pride in the Assyrians in today’s first reading from the Prophet Isaiah. God was delivering his people in the kingdom of Judah into the Assyrians’ hand to help his people realize what they had done in entrusting themselves to Assyria rather than God. It was to help his people convert. But Assyria responded with arrogance, in order to bring his people to conversion, but they responded with arrogance. They were the “axe,” “saw,” “rod” and “staff” God used, but they forget that they were instruments in the hands of the Almighty rather than almighty themselves. Putting Assyria’s attitude into words, God describes through his prophet Isaiah the Assyrians’ intellectual pride: “By my own power I have done it, and by my wisdom, for I am shrewd,” the Assyrians were saying. “I have moved the boundaries of peoples, their treasures I have pillaged, and, like a giant, I have put down the enthroned. My hand has seized like a nest the riches of nations; as one takes eggs left alone, so I took in all the earth.” There was no openness to God. They were too wise and clever, to powerful and wise on their own accord, too shrewd, too giant-like in their own estimation, to need God. Jesus in the Gospel was clearly referring to those scribes and Pharisees whose intimate knowledge of the Scriptures actually prevented rather than facilitated their hearing him speaking to them live in the Word made flesh. They not only resisted Jesus’ words, they not only pretended that even his miracles were done by the power of the devil, but they ended up culminating their resistance to God’s word by breaking the fifth and seventh commandments and conspiring to frame and to kill Jesus. Jesus calls us not to be clever like them, but to progress to full stature, to mature manhood, precisely through spiritual childhood. Jesus uses an expression in Greek of the childlike that means “non-speaking” or “no-word,” pointing to the stage of infancy before children are able to express themselves in words. That doesn’t mean they’re babblers, but that they’re defined not by their own words, their own thoughts, their own opinions, but by accepting Jesus’ word, living in accordance with, and announcing it. It’s not their own ideas that matter, but God’s. They’re able to enter into the mysteries because they’re docile, because they accept Jesus, who is the revelation of all the hidden things he himself announces. Jesus, “the Son,” wishes to reveal the Father to all of us, but only the childlike, only the docile, only those with good soil accept that revelation enfleshed in Jesus.
• Third, we need to receive that revelation also with joy, because if we’re not receiving God’s revelation with joy, we’re not receiving it in its fullness, because Jesus came so that his joy might be in us and our joy complete (Jn 15:11). In today’s prayer, Jesus exclaims, “Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will!” He rejoices in it. He rejoices in the Father’s will throughout his life, even when it would lead to his saying, “Not my will, but thy will, be done!” while sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, or entrusting himself to the Father from the Cross, or leaving the tomb, or (together with the Father) sending the Holy Spirit, or calling each of us. Likewise we’re called to rejoice at the will of God, even when at a human level it’s excruciating. That’s what truly childlike trust leads us to do. This is essential for our living out our Christian obedience well, not to mention our promises and vows of obedience in the priesthood and religious life respectively. God wants to help us to do his will with cheerfulness, even when it’s not easy.
• The saint the Church celebrates today, St. Bonaventure, is an icon of the type of conversion to spiritual childhood to which our faith calls us. When St. Bonaventure was a young man, he found it hard to welcome the Lord because he was obsessed with his own sins and sinfulness. Even though later spiritual directors wondered whether he had ever committed a mortal sin, all he could see were his moral defects, failures and poor choices for which he was constantly doing penance and mortification. He was focused on himself rather than on God, trying to take responsibility rather than relating to God as a beloved son. Eventually he was cured of this form of scrupulosity through learning to welcome and trust fully in the Lord’s mercy, and he spent the rest of his life trying to help others similarly to relate to the Lord with loving trust. We have in the Office of Readings this morning a powerful passage from his most famous spiritual work, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, “The Journey of the Soul into [the very life of] God.” It’s really a commentary on the way of spiritual childhood in contrast to the way of the “wise and the clever.” To please God, to enter into deeper relationship with him, we must seek him, paradoxically, “in God’s grace, not in doctrine; in the longing of the will, not in the understanding; in the sighs of prayer, not in research; the Bridegroom not the Teacher; God and not man; darkness not daylight; and look not to the light but rather to the raging fire that carries the soul to God with intense fervor and glowing love.” In the world we often place emphasize what we can do, what we’ve learned, what we’ve understood, our own study, the light rather than the unknowing darkness, but St. Bonaventure lays out for us the path of how Jesus reveals the Father, how to enter into a childlike bond with joy. We’ll do so by allowing God to lead us through grace, longing, prayer, darkness and burning, spousal love. He goes on to say that for us truly to enter into God we must die to the old Adam in us through entering into Jesus’ Paschal Mystery, through taking up our cross and following him: “Let us die, then,” he continues, “and … pass over with the crucified Christ from this world to the Father.” Christ on the Cross reveals the Father’s merciful love to us in the most powerful way and the more we enter into that mystery with childlike trust, the more God is able to turn our tears, sufferings and everything else into joy.
• The great place we learn to say with every cell of our body  “Yes, Father! Such has been your gracious will!,” together with Jesus, is here at Mass. This is the place where we say, “I give you praise, Father, Lord of Heaven and earth.” The word translated, “I give you praise, Father,” is better translated, “I gratefully avow, Father.” Jesus was vowing, consecrating, committing himself to the Father with gratitude over his plan. Mass is the place we do so. Mass is the place where we become more childlike. I’ve always loved Psalm 43 that priests pray at the foot of the altar in the extraordinary form of the Mass. It begins, “I will go up to the altar of God to the God who rejuvenates me with joy.” Every time we approach Mass we become more childlike, we fill ourselves not with our own words but the words of the Church, the bride and body of Christ that we make in unison with him. The Mass is the place of the revelation of Jesus’ word and the fullness of his divine love. This is where St. Bonaventure himself learned it. His famous Transfige, which the Church continues to recommend that we pray after Mass to the Lord we have welcomed him within, shows how he turns to Jesus to lead him more deeply into the revelation of the Father through the Son through grace, longing, sighs of prayer, darkness, intense fervor and ardent spousal love. In that prayer, he asks, “May my heart ever hunger after and feed upon you, Whom the angels desire to look upon, and may my inmost soul be filled with the sweetness of your savor; may it ever thirst for you, the fountain of life, the fountain of wisdom and knowledge, the fountain of eternal light, the torrent of pleasure, the fulness of the house of God; may it ever compass you, seek you, find you, run to you, come up to you, meditate on you, speak of you, and do all for the praise and glory of your name, with humility and discretion, with love and delight, with ease and affection, with perseverance to the end; and be yours alone ever my hope, my entire confidence, my riches, my delight, my pleasure, my joy, my rest and tranquility, my peace, my sweetness, my food, my refreshment, my refuge, my help, my wisdom, my portion, my possession, my treasure; in Whom may my mind and my heart be ever fixed and firm and rooted immovably.” Together with St. Bonaventure and all the saints, we rejoice to be here, we gratefully renew our vows to God, we praise him for his gracious will, and we ask him for all the graces we need, like trusting children, to spend our lives as living, loving commentaries of that holy grace and holy will!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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