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We all have our own way of praying and we pray in different ways at different times. Sometimes our prayer is quite formal. We recite prayers that have been written for us. Many of the prayers we pray at Mass are of that kind. At other times our prayers are less formal and much more personal. We pray out of our own hearts, out of the experience of our own lives, using our own words or, perhaps, no words at all. That form of prayer is deeply personal to each of us; it can be very revealing of the kind of person we are and of the particular situation in which we find ourselves.
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The first part of this morning’s gospel reading is one of the examples of the prayer of Jesus that we find in the gospels. We are perhaps familiar with his prayer of petition in the Garden of Gethsemane, ‘Father, take this cup from me’, his prayer of intercession from the cross, ‘Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing’ or, indeed, his prayer of desolation from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ We may be less familiar with the prayer of Jesus in this morning’s gospel reading, which is a prayer of praise to God, ‘I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children’. We prayer together a formal prayer of praise towards the beginning of Mass, ‘Glory to God in the highest...’ We may find ourselves praising and blessing God in a more informal and personal way at other times. We might have a sense of God touching our lives in a way that leaves us greatly graced and we respond with a short prayer of praise that comes straight from our heart. That is the kind of prayer we find Jesus praying in this morning’s gospel reading.
Jesus is greatly struck by the fact that those who think of themselves as learned and clever have been largely rejecting him, whereas those whom Jesus refers to as ‘children’ have been welcoming his message and energetically seeking him out. ‘Children’ in this sense refers to those whom the learned and clever would consider uneducated, foolish, uniformed and unimpressive. Jesus is referring to the powerless, the broken, the unlettered, those who have a deep awareness of their own fundamental poverty. Jesus gives praise to God that it is above all this group whom God is touching in and through his ministry. This prayer of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel seems to be linked to a saying of Jesus a few chapters later in Matthew’s gospel, ‘Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’. People enter the kingdom of heaven by coming to Jesus and Jesus was aware that people have to become like ‘children’ if they are to come to him. We have to acknowledge that fundamental poverty that comes with the human condition. There is a church in Bethlehem built over what is believed to be the site of the birth of Jesus. It has a very low door and to enter the church you have to stoop low to get through the door. It is symbolic of how we enter the kingdom of heaven. Our knowledge, our learning, our abilities, our experience can all come between us and the Lord
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insofar as they make us proud, too sure of ourselves, too dismissive of weakness in ourselves or in others. The first beatitude that Jesus spoke in Matthew’s gospel was, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’. It is not the case that we need to deny our abilities, our gifts, our learning, our experience, all that goes into making us who we are. On the contrary, we acknowledge all of that, but rather than it making us proud, it should make us grateful. In acknowledging what we have, we, at the same time, acknowledge God as the source of it all, as the Scriptures say, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord’. We also recognize that before God we really have nothing; we are beggars in his presence, regardless of what we might have achieved or accomplished, or how others might have come to see us.
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In the gospel reading Jesus points to himself as the one who embodies this attitude of poverty of spirit. ‘Learn from me’, he says, ‘for I am gentle and humble of heart’. He is displays this attitude in the course of his prayer of praise when he says there, ‘Everything has been entrusted to me by my Father’. Jesus was very aware that God was the ultimate source of all that he had. All that he said and did had its origin in God and not in himself. This humility and gentleness of heart that Jesus embodies and calls on his disciples to have is the opposite of arrogance. Jesus relied on the Father for everything and he calls on us to rely on him, to lean on him. This is his invitation to all of us in today’s gospel reading, ‘Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest’. It is only those who have learned to become like children who will be able to hear that invitation and respond to it.
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