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.
Those abilities which might conduce to arrogance were not useful in attaining the truth about Jesus. His identity was not something that would be the most perfectly understood by academics or scientists who would then stand as experts and gatekeepers of the truth. Indeed it seemed that attempts to know Jesus through wisdom of that kind were fraught, failing more often than they succeeded. This is not to say that the truth about Jesus required one to embrace something irrational. Rather, it was something supra-rational, requiring one to recognize his limits and embrace a posture of reception and humility.
But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God (see First Corinthians 1:127-29).
God desired Jesus to be the focal point of divine revelation. There was no way to get to the truth without going through him. Because of who Jesus was, as the way, the truth, and the life, it was appropriate for him to be the one source capable of revealing the Father to the world. It delighted the Father that the Son should make him known. In turn, it was the joy of the heart of the Son to make known the Father. Such a relationship could possibly be described in academic terms once it was revealed. One could speak of processions and hypostases and such. But one could not capture the dynamic intimacy shared by the Father and the Son in such terms. One could only get a glimpse into that world without end if one was willing to allow Jesus himself to show it to him.
All things have been handed over to me by my Father.
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.
Jesus reveled something even deeper than the divine name that God revealed to Moses at the burning bush. The reality that God was being itself (ipsum esse subsistens) was something that philosophers might have eventually realized independently. But that he was a Trinity of persons is something that we could only know through divine revelation. The fact that revelation is required to know the truth of our faith does not make it a mystery cult with degrees of initiation and secret knowledge. Rather, the Church desires the world to know what she knows. The only limitation is that those who wish to receive must be childlike. As Jesus said in a different place, "unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven" (see Matthew 18:3). But the point of becoming like children is not embracing ignorance. As we have said, Christianity is not in fact irrational, but rather transcends reason. The point of becoming childlike is that by doing so we become more like Jesus himself, and more capable of participating in the relationship with the Father that is properly his, but which he desires to share with us. It is only this participation, possible through humility, that constitutes true revelation of the Father's heart.
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