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. Theologian Roberta Bondi offers this perspective on today’s Gospel, in her book To Love as God Loves. “Humility was an offensive characteristic for a God in the eyes of early non-Christians. How could Christians worship a God who deliberately chose to share in human birth, with all its mess and vulnerability and limitation, as well as a shameful death?”

She asks, “How can we now worship a God to whom all the unimportant little details of our lives actually matter? How can we respect a God who takes us more seriously than we sometimes take ourselves? And yet is not impressed with all our accomplishments. A God who loves us equally well whether we succeed or fail? How could it really be that God simply disregards not only our education, our tastes, our industry, our niceness, our worthiness, in order to love us?”