15th Week in Ordinary Time (B) : Wednesday 17th July 2024

Ever ponder why Jesus praised God for hiding things from the learned and revealing them to mere children? To our logic, learned people are better at understanding the values Jesus is trying to teach. Indeed, the Jewish adults are usually able to digest their familiar ancestral knowledge better while children take longer to process and understand them.

Let us look at the context of that era from the Israelite perspective. Adults keep the knowledge handed to them, they will strictly conserve them according to how they were brought up and trained. Children, on the other hand, take in knowledge eagerly as it is presented to them. Granted that they will ask questions in order to help them understand better but adults will try to conserve and critically analyse the new vision presented to them. The conditioning pride in adults hinder the reception of renewed understanding due to their closed-minded way of preservation. It is interesting to find children at play, eager to learn with joy.

Hence, Jesus highlights such comparison because the Scribes and Pharisees rigidly question whatever He teaches and His identity as the Messiah. While it is good to ascertain facts to understand them better, we should not go to the extent of rigidly resisting newness and refuting everything. No knowledgeable adult would claim to have all the answers for the world. Ultimately, there are some things which we can only accept in humility and faith.

Lord, may our childlike openness give us insights of Your providence.