In keeping with my practice in recent years, I propose to again post a series of short Advent reflections. Here’s the first:

‘I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure. All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. (Mt 11:25–27)

It is God’s way—it keeps being so—to hide Himself from those whom Jesus ironically calls “wise and learned.” It is God’s way—it keeps being so!—to reveal Himself to the humble. The relevance of this text to understanding the mission of Jesus is decisive. His God can only be known through the revelation made to the “little children.” There is no other place where Jesus has wanted to reveal his Father to us. This is how God has wanted it. He does not want human beings to identify Him with the Law, with the cult, with power, with ritual purity, with judgment, and with punishment. He does not want to be identified with the encyclicals, the canonical code, liturgical rubrics, or other fanciful things. Only in the revelation to those who do not count—the marginalized and those who remain excluded from everything—can the true face of God be known. For this reason, Jesus perceives himself as a relief for the afflicted and the oppressed. (see Mt 11:28-30). Jesus frees God from His own yoke. And he frees the poor from the God that had condemned them to their fate by showing them that God is with them, that He has decided to undergo the same fate as the poor. For this reason, he calls them “blessed.” The new times they have hoped for have come’.

– Oscar Campana, ‘Jesus, the Poor, and Theology’ in Getting the Poor Down From the Cross: Christology of Liberation (ed. José María Vigil; np: International Teological Commission of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians, 2007), 58.

BTW: It’s always worth heading over to Hopeful Imagination this time of year to read the Advent reflections.