When climbing gets us nowhere.

We live in a single-story house, so it took a while before my boys learned the wonder of the "staircase." It also spared Ashley and I some of the anxieties that those who raise children in multi-story homes have.

But it also meant that when the boys did encounter stairs, such as those at "mimi and baba's" house, it became a quick object of fascination. The flat, safe expanse of the single-floor was no longer enough. There are heights to be conquered, rungs to be climbed, a world above that beckons with the promise of bigger things.

Parents watch with a mixture of pride and terror as their little one grips the banister and begins the ascent. Up, up, up. And then, inevitably, the small body wobbles, the grip loosens, and the climb that began with such determination ends with tears and outstretched arms reaching for the very lap they had abandoned.

We never quite outgrow this phase. We just trade the staircase for subtler ladders.

The ladder of accomplishment. The ladder of recognition. The ladder of spiritual progress, where each rung is measured in skills mastered, books read, virtues acquired.

We climb because climbing feels like growth, and growth feels like life. Yet at the top of every ladder we erect for ourselves, we find just as children do the same wobbling knees beneath us, the same fear, the same desperate longing for arms that will simply hold us.

It is into this exhausted pattern of climbing, always up, up, up, that Jesus speaks some of the most tender words in all the Gospels: "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants" (Matthew 11:25).

 

The Scandal of Smallness

What is so striking about this passage is the company it keeps. Just before these tender words, Jesus has been pronouncing woes. He has rebuked Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum, declaring that Tyre and Sidon, even Sodom, would have repented in sackcloth and ashes had they seen what these cities had seen (Matthew 11:21–24).

The contrast is jarring. The pagan cities that had sometimes been looked down upon as having received their "just deserts" in the triumphalism of the imagination of the Jewish people in Jesus' day, cities infamous for their pride, would have humbled themselves. They'd have repented in sackcloth and ashes!

But the cities that hosted the Messiah, that had benefitted from His miracles, remained unmoved.

Why? Because they had something to protect. They had reputations, religious infrastructure, theological pedigree.

They were already climbing their own ladders and had no intention of climbing down.

The Greek word for "infants" in verse 25 is nēpioi, which refers to a very young child, one who cannot yet speak. It is the opposite of sophoi and synetoi, the wise and intelligent.

Jesus is not condemning learning itself. He is exposing what learning so often becomes: another rung on the ladder, another reason to believe we have made ourselves into someone worth God's attention.

The woe is for those who climb. The blessing is for those who let themselves be small.

 

"Useful" or Beloved?

There is a temptation, especially for those who have devoted themselves to the things of God, to confuse usefulness with belovedness.

We begin to imagine that God needs us. That our gifts, our intellect, our zeal somehow contribute to the running of the universe.

We become, in our own minds, sophisticated spiritual machines, well-oiled, prepped for divine deployment.

But God did not create a workshop full of useful tools. He created children.

He created sons and daughters.

The Hebrew Scriptures do not open with God commissioning a workforce. They open with God speaking light into being and calling it good, simply because it is. The crown of creation, made in God's image, is not introduced as God's employee but as God's beloved, walking with Him in the cool of the evening (Genesis 3:8).

When Jesus invites us to come to Him, He does not say, "Come to me, all you who are skilled and accomplished." He says, "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28). The qualification is exhaustion, not excellence. The credential is need, not achievement.

This cuts against everything the world has trained us to believe. We are taught from childhood that love must be earned, that affection follows performance, that the praise of those we admire is a prize to be won. And so we transfer this same anxious arithmetic to our relationship with God. We try to make ourselves lovable, as if His love were a wage to be earned by spiritual labor.

But the logic of the Gospel runs the other way. We are not loved because we are lovable. We are lovable because we are loved. The infant in the mother's arms has done nothing to earn her gaze. A mom does not love her child because the child has impressed her. She loves the child because the child is hers.

And in that love, the child becomes precious beyond measure.

 

The Yoke That Fits the Small

Then comes an invitation, perplexing at first glance, but beautiful in substance: "Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light" (Matthew 11:29–30).

A yoke is, by definition, a thing that binds. It is the implement laid across the shoulders of cattle so that they might pull a plow or a cart.

To offer someone a yoke is to offer them work. And yet Jesus offers His yoke as the path to rest.

The Greek word translated "easy" is chrēstos, which can also mean "kindly" or "well-fitting."

Rabbinic teachers spoke of taking on the "yoke of the Torah," and each rabbi had his own particular interpretation, his own way of carrying the Law.

Jesus is presenting His way, His interpretation, His school of discipleship. And what He promises is that His yoke fits. It is not crushing. It is not sized for someone larger than us.

It is made precisely for the small. For those who would be as infants, not sages.

This is why the call to smallness is not a call to be less than human. It is a call to be human in the way God designed us to be.

The proud cannot fit into the yoke of Christ because they have inflated themselves like balloons.

When my boys get balloons, they never throw them away. They bounce around the house for weeks, slowly deflating, but never completely. They take up space, and once I realize they are no longer being played with, I toss them out.

But if I just put the balloons, inflated with stale hot air, into the garbage, I'd fill up the bin with just a few. They have to be deflated. They must be "reduced" to their proper size, the mass that's proper to the balloon itself, not the air that has puffed it up.

The infant fits Jesus' yoke because the infant has not yet pretended to be anything other than what he is.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who understood this passage perhaps better than anyone, wrote of her "little way" precisely as a refusal to climb.

She saw herself as too small to climb the rough staircase of perfection, and so she looked instead for an elevator. She knew she would never be able to achieve what the "great saints" of renown had accomplished. And when she turned to the Scriptures, she found the elevator she was looking for.

That elevator was the arms of Jesus. "I have no need to grow up," she wrote in essence. "On the contrary, I must remain little and become more so each day."

 

The Hidden Things

Notice that Jesus says these things have been hidden from the wise and revealed to infants. 

There is something here that must be received, not achieved. There is a kind of seeing that the climbing self cannot do, because the climbing self is always looking up at the next rung, and the things of God are revealed in a different direction altogether.

The mystics have long known that the deepest knowledge of God is not acquired but given. Saint John of the Cross spoke of the nada, the nothing, through which the soul must pass to find the todo, the all. The intellect must be quieted. The will must be surrendered. The memory must be emptied. Not because these faculties are evil, but because they cannot grasp God by their own striving. They can only receive Him in poverty.

This is the great reversal: the more we try to make ourselves spiritually impressive, the less we are able to perceive the very God we are trying to impress. We end up like the religious leaders of Jesus' day, surrounded by miracles, trampling on the Messiah, because we are looking for someone our size to validate us, rather than letting ourselves be small enough to be cradled by Him.

A bit of a confession, because I'm not saying these things today without experience.

I have always felt like a bit of a fraud of a theologian. This self-abasement used to cause me great distress.

Then, I learned that St. John Henry Newman felt the same. If you don't know Newman, well, if you've followed me enough you've certainly heard of Aquinas. Newman might be the second-greatest intellect that Christianity has ever produced, next to Aquinas. He was absolutely brilliant. But he thought he was a fraud. He did not think he was worth of the title of "theologian."

Perhaps the only great theologians are those who know that, by their merits, they are indeed frauds.

For no theology that proceeds from my virtues or merits—I have none to claim—is worth a single penny. Any thought, any insight, any knowledge or illumination, that I might offer is not on account of any kind of personal brilliance, but on account of He who has chosen to speak through the most foolish of all vessels that His Love might, in the scandal His embrace, demonstrate to my fellow frauds and fools that they, too, are loved.

I remember back to my days as a doctoral student. I was always so eager to raise my hand, to answer the professor's questions, all in a vain effort to impress.

Jesus was not impressed, I'm convinced, by any comment I added in class.

I had that "urge" to impress precisely because I felt like a fraud, I knew I had struggled through the readings, and I had thought that all the other students had grasped them better (they probably had struggled just as I had).

Oh, what trials I used to endure on account of my desire to prove myself. What foolish and self-centered effort!

It did not take reading some great theologian, or philosopher, to show me the better way.

It took a simple message, the kind of message Jesus gave in the text that we're discussing today.

The trials I endured were only made more ardous by my stubbornness, my blindness. My eyes were always fixed on the next rung of the ladder, I was always looking up, up, up.

But Jesus wanted me to let go. To descend. To look down, down, down.

Those trials, though, were a gift (like the "woe" pronounced to the obstinate cities that Jesus spoke harshly to in the Gospel text) meant to teach me something simple, the kind of thing I didn't need large and difficult reading assignments to grasp.

I had to become small. I had to become like the infants Jesus calls to bear His yoke. Only then would I know peace.

 

Living Small

How, then, do we walk this path of smallness in a world that rewards bigness, achievement, progress, at every turn?

First, we begin by noticing the ladders. Each of us has them. Some are obvious: career, achievement, public recognition. Some are subtle and even spiritual: the ladder of being known as devout, the ladder of having read the right books, the ladder of being the dependable one in our family or parish. The ladders are not necessarily evil in themselves.

The problem is when we begin to confuse them with the path to God's love. Take a quiet inventory. Where are you climbing? What are you trying to prove? To whom?

Second, pray more like the infant than the eloquent theologian. Set aside time, even just five minutes, when you do nothing but rest in the awareness that you are loved. Not loved because of what you have done. Not loved because of what you might do tomorrow. Just loved. This is harder than it sounds. The mind will rebel. It will produce reasons why you must justify your existence. Let those thoughts pass like clouds, and return again to the simple fact: I am held.

Third, learn to receive. Many of us are far better at giving than receiving. We feel comfortable being the helper, the giver, the one with something to offer. We feel awkward and exposed when someone offers us something we cannot reciprocate. This is precisely the muscle that needs strengthening. Receive a compliment without deflecting it. Receive a kindness without immediately calculating how to repay it. Receive God's love without trying to earn it. Receiving is the vocation of the beloved.

Fourth, embrace the small acts. The little way of Thérèse was not about doing nothing. It was about doing whatever is given to you to do with great love. A patient word. A hidden sacrifice. A smile when you would rather sulk. These are the gestures of a soul that has stopped trying to impress and started simply loving. They are the gestures of an infant who delights her father not by her achievements but by her trust.

Finally, when you find yourself anxious, exhausted, climbing, hear again the voice that calls across the centuries: "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28). The rest is real. The arms are real. The yoke is well-fitted, and the burden is light.

The God of the universe does not need a sophisticated machine, a brilliant professor, or a successful entrepreneuer. He has chosen instead to love a small and trusting soul. He has hidden the deepest things from the climbing and revealed them to the resting. And in the surrender of all our trying, in the descent into our own smallness, we discover what the saints have always known: the lap of the Father was waiting for us all along.