Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A (2026) - Fr Robert Krishna, OP

Rhetoric, the art of giving finely crafted and persuasive speeches, is often condemned. The paradox about condemnations of rhetoric, however, is that the best of them are themselves finely crafted speeches, great examples of precisely what they apparently condemn. There is something of that in Jesus’ praising the Father for hiding these things from the learned and the clever, and revealing them to little ones: Isn’t he also clever and obviously learned in the way he uses and interprets Scripture and the world around him? But Jesus is not being hypocritical, because the problem with the learned and the clever whom Jesus is speaking against, is not that they are learned and clever. God doesn’t hide things from them because he dislikes their learning or cleverness. It is that their cleverness, their learning, has prevented them from approaching God with openness. Learning and cleverness, like well-written speeches, like the kind of power that the first reading speaks about, are all means to an end. They are meant to draw us to something else, ultimately to someone else, God. But often they are treated as ends in themselves, so that we become focused on admiring our own cleverness, our power or wealth. Or worse, we admire someone else who possesses cleverness or learning, power or wealth. This is the great fall of humanity. We become worshippers of things other than God, things which our own minds and mouths have fashioned, which our own hands have made. What God gives us to draw our attention to him, we instead worship.

The humility of Jesus, today’s collect says, is the ultimate response of God to this tendency to idolatry in us. God redeems the fallen world not from afar, but by coming down to us in the incarnation, suffering the result of our sins, and dying our death. Labouring and overburdened as we are by our chasing after idols, Jesus invites us to share in his cross. Of course, knowing our needs and our weaknesses, he also attracts us by his deeds of power, miracles, healings, beautifully crafted speeches, and profound interpretations of Scripture and of the ways of God. But ultimately his redemption of us occurs through his suffering the most debased and shameful of human deaths on the Cross. Like the messianic king of Zechariah, he is humble and rides on a donkey, but he does this on his way to nothing we normally consider a throne: he does it on the way to the Cross. He exercises his rule bringing peace from sea to sea, from the river to the ends of the earth, not by great slaughter, but by offering all humanity a share in his Cross. And in that sharing lies the challenge of our Lord’s call: The humility of the Son of God is not for show, something for us to enjoy just as spectators. The knowledge Christ offers is learnt by experience. We are supposed to learn from him by imitating his humility in practice. We find rest for our souls by imitating his work.

Of course, we hear this again and again in Church, and it is easy to nod along to it. But we need to live it practically. One essential aid to living it practically is our very sense of labouring and being overburdened, by our tiredness and our failures. These can make us despair about ourselves, or bitter and resentful against the people around us and in the world. But Jesus triumphed precisely by his failure: He defeated death in the resurrection by undergoing the cross. He formed his disciples into the Church after they had all fled from him. He converted the learned and the clever, after proving that they were correct in predicting that his foolishness would lead to his rejection and death. We are called not to let our failures, even our failure in living the Christian life, lead us to despair or bitterness. Rather they should make us turn to him in trust through the sacraments of Confession and Holy Eucharist, through our prayers and our continuing effort at turning our lives around. And we are called to let that same attitude shape how we regard the people around us, not let their failures and weaknesses, their lack of cleverness or learning or power or wealth or attractiveness shape how we pay attention to them. In them too, Christ calls us to share his cross, and by sharing his cross, enter with them into his rest.

Fr Robert Krishna, OP teaches Biblical Studies at Holy Name of Mary Seminary, Honiara, Solomon Islands and is currently assigned to St Laurence's Priory, North Adelaide, South Australia.