Isaiah 10.5-7,13-16; Ps 93; Matthew 11.25-27
For more than a century the consensus view has been that Mark was the first Gospel to be written. Mark’s Jesus is a man of action rather than words; Mark’s favourite word is immediately. Matthew’s Gospel seems very closely related to Mark’s: something like 90% of the verses of Mark’s Gospel can be found in Matthew’s. But Matthew’s Jesus is a teacher, and so Matthew breaks up Mark’s action-oriented narrative with five blocks of teaching, probably analogous to the five books of Moses in the Old Testament (that is, the first five books of the Bible). Our reading today comes from the third of those blocks of teaching.
And yet the methodology of his teaching will surprise us. Jesus doesn’t speak to his disciples, but instead speaks to the ‘Father, Lord of heaven and earth’. These verses are best described as prayer, and Jesus is teaching us by the words he prays. We often think of prayer as the method of extracting favours from God. But prayer is better thought of as the language of our relationship with God. We grow in our relationships with other human beings by talking with them, by conversing (from Latin words that mean ‘turning towards’) with them. Jesus invites us to enter into deeper relationship with the Maker of heaven and earth by turning to him, speaking to him from our hearts, listening as he speaks to us and in the process to grow from infancy to maturity as he reveals himself to us.