Coffee With God

Reflection: Matthew 11: 25- 27

Today’s Gospel passage speaks of a thanksgiving prayer of Jesus. He thanks the heavenly Father, for revealing the mysteries of God to the ordinary people. The scribes and the religious scholars and the temple authorities rejected Jesus – the mystery of God, while the simple, ordinary people in the villages accepted him. The self-proclaimed intellectuals had approached him to find faults with his words and actions; but the humble flocked to him listen to his message of comfort, acceptance and love. Jesus does not condemn wisdom and the intellectual power; what he condemns is the intellectual pride of the learned. This passage closes with a self-introduction of Jesus: It is here Jesus explains his Mission – that he alone can reveal God to people and that he is The Son of God. “No one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.” John the evangelist puts this in a different way, where Jesus tells, “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn.14:9). What Jesus says is this: If you want to see what God is like, if you want to see the mind of God, the heart of God, the nature of God, and if you want to see God’s relationship with people –look at me! As the saying goes, “It is the heart, not the head, is the home of the gospel.” It is not cleverness which shuts us out of the grace of God; instead, it is our pride. And it is not foolishness which makes us accept the message of the Gospel; rather it is humility. God’s mysteries are revealed to the childlike, those who look at everything with the excitement and openness of a child. The problems in the community and in the Church begin to appear from the day we begin to develop the attitude of “I know it all,” and “No one needs to tell me.” This is a challenge for the pastors and leaders of the Church communities of our times – to keep aside our ego and pride and to be humble before the people of God. The openness and wonder and not being judgmental are the qualities of children and the Gospel invites us to practice these virtues, or learn from the children. This requires humility. Humility brings us to the awareness that we do not have all the answers. This helps us to stand before the mystery of God, wrapped in wonder.