St Luke has preserved for us one of Jesus explicit prayers
to the Father. These prayers of our Lord are a very precious and wondrous thing
for us to have.
I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and
revealed them to infants; yes Father for such was your gracious will. (RSVCE,
Lk 10:21-24)
We notice that our Lord begins with thanksgiving. He thanks
the Father for ‘hiding’ the mysteries of the Kingdom from those who think they
are ‘wise’ and ‘understanding’. This is not our Lord being anti-intellectual.
Our intelligence is God-given and therefore good, but if we suffer with pride
our intelligence can get in the way. Pride means we forget God; we make our own
human intelligence the superior intelligence. And this blocks our minds from
opening to the truths revealed by God.
Our faith is a faith based on divine revelation. It does not
contradict our God-given intellectual powers, but if we are proud then we will
not be open to divine revelation, because we will not be willing to humble
ourselves to accept it. Just as God is willing to condescend to reveal Himself
out of His great love for us, so He requires of us to humble ourselves to
accept His revelation. We must be like infants. To accept divine revelation
does not require us to be super-intellectual and neither do we need to be
anti-intellectual, but we do need to humble ourselves.
Our Lord’s exclamation, “Yes Father!”, mirrors the fiat of His mother when at His
conception she gave herself to become the Mother of God the Son. It expresses
the depth of His sacred heart and prefigures His prayer at Gethsemane, when He
gave Himself to His Father’s will.
The whole prayer of our Lord is an expression of the loving
adherence of His human heart to the will of His heavenly Father.
So let us this Advent, following the example of Our Lord and
His mother, give our hearts to the will of our heavenly Father.
Fr Ian
