Please read this passage before reading the homily.
My sisters and brothers,
In today’s Reading, Jesus speaks, first to his Father, then to us.
He praises the Father because his Father has shown great care for the little ones.
This has been God’s usual practice. Ancient Israel was a tiny piece of land between a powerful Egypt and Mesopotamian powerhouse. God chose Israel for the special revelation of God’s word. God sustained the Israelites through famines, through journeys, through exiles, and through oppressive foreign rulers to tiny Israel, God sent Jesus so that through the weakness of a child’s birth in an obscure place in the Middle East, God would save all nations.
God cannot be seen; God is invisible. This invisible God took on human flesh so that we could see what God is really like.
In human families, parents pass on to their children their likenesses, and children reflect the likenesses of their parents. In human families, parents and children are alike in how they speak, walk, and interact with people. In human families, we readily see family resemblances.
It is the same in the divine family. The Father generates the Son, and the relationship is so close that to see the Father is to see the Son and vice versa. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.
Note that if we know the Father it is because the Son has chosen to reveal him to us, not because we chose to know the Father. It is those who labor and are burdened, those of low estate, those whom others reject, and those who are poor to whom Christ chooses to reveal the Father.