The Borrowed Blade

An axe splits a log, and for a second the blade looks powerful. But the blade did nothing. The arm behind it did the work, and the axe went exactly where the hand sent it. Isaiah grabs that small, obvious picture and swings it at an empire that had started to believe its own strength was its own. The Gospel runs the same test on the educated men of Jesus’ day and finds them failing it. Today, the Church keeps the Memorial of Saint Bonaventure, a man brilliant enough to lecture at Paris and humble enough to know he was the blade, not the hand. Both readings put one question to you. When your life goes right, who do you think swung it?

The Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi at sunset. Saint Bonaventure led the Franciscans and wrote the life of Saint Francis. Licensed via Adobe Stock, ID 281093609.

The Readings

First Reading: Isaiah 10:5–7, 13b–16

Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger, the staff of my fury! Against a godless nation I send him, and against the people of my wrath I command him, to take spoil and seize plunder, and to tread them down like the mire of the streets. But he does not so intend, and his mind does not so think; but it is in his mind to destroy, and to cut off nations not a few;

For he says: “By the strength of my hand I have done it, and by my wisdom, for I have understanding; I have removed the boundaries of peoples, and have plundered their treasures; like a bull I have brought down those who sat on thrones. My hand has found like a nest the wealth of the peoples; and as men gather eggs that have been forsaken so I have gathered all the earth; and there was none that moved a wing, or opened the mouth, or chirped.”

Shall the axe vaunt itself over him who hews with it, or the saw magnify itself against him who wields it? As if a rod should wield him who lifts it, or as if a staff should lift him who is not wood! Therefore the Lord, the Lord of hosts, will send wasting sickness among his stout warriors, and under his glory a burning will be kindled, like the burning of fire.

Gospel: Matthew 11:25–27

At that time Jesus declared, “I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes; yea, Father, for such was thy gracious will. All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”

Scriptural Analysis

Begin with Assyria. The Gospel opens up once you’ve seen what pride does to a nation first.

Isaiah is writing while the Assyrian army is chewing its way across the ancient Near East, and he makes a claim about it that should stop us. Assyria is a tool in God’s hand. “The rod of my anger, the staff of my fury.” The Lord is using a pagan war machine to discipline his own faithless people. The Church reads this carefully because Isaiah is teaching us how God governs history. The Catechism reaches for these exact verses to show that Scripture often assigns an action directly to God without pausing to list the human causes in the middle, and it does this on purpose, to hold onto God’s primacy and total Lordship over history even while armies march and kings plot.[1] Assyria is real. Its cruelty is real. And God is still the one steering the result.

Then Assyria slips. The empire “does not so intend.” God commissioned discipline; Assyria arrives with genocide in mind, hungry “to destroy, and to cut off nations not a few.” And out comes the boast. Read it slowly, because every clause is a claim. “By the strength of my hand I have done it, and by my wisdom.” My hand. My wisdom. Assyria takes a run of victories that God placed in its lap and reads the whole thing as a trophy case of its own greatness. It brags about shoving borders around and emptying treasuries “like a bull,” about scooping up nations the way a boy robs an abandoned nest, without a single chirp of protest.

Isaiah answers the boast with one image that flattens it. “Shall the axe vaunt itself over him who hews with it?” Sit with the picture. The tree comes down, and the axe steps forward to take the credit. Saint Thomas Aquinas puts his finger on the sheer absurdity of it. An axe is an instrument, and an instrument does nothing at all except by the motion of the craftsman who swings it.[2] The blade in the wood, the saw in the plank, every one of those cuts is borrowed motion. Assyria had borrowed motion for the entire campaign, and it turned around to congratulate its own edge. So the verdict falls. “The Lord of hosts will send wasting sickness among his stout warriors.” The proud instrument goes back on the shelf.

What exactly is the sin? It goes deeper than arrogance. Reading Isaiah, the Church names it precisely: pride is arrogating to yourself what belongs to God, stepping into God’s place and stamping his gifts with your own name.[3] Origen noticed that this is not only Assyria’s disease. Each of us runs a private, smaller version of the same con. “Every evildoer makes an idol of what he desires,” he wrote, and “we make many idols in the depth of our hearts when we sin.”[4] The axe that thinks it felled the tree has quietly carved a little god out of itself.

Now step into the Gospel, and the first thing to notice is that Jesus is praying, which Matthew almost never lets us see. We are allowed to listen in here, and after this only twice more, both at the edge of everything: in Gethsemane and on the cross.[5] So the words carry weight. And what does he pray? He thanks the Father for hiding “these things from the wise and understanding” and handing them instead to “babes.”

The wise and the learned are not hard to place. In Matthew’s storyline, they are the scribes and Pharisees, the certified experts who have watched Jesus heal and cast out demons and walked away cold.[6] The “babes,” the little ones, are the disciples, men with no credentials and no standing who somehow catch what the scholars keep missing. And Jesus says plainly why. It has nothing to do with IQ. It is grace, a gift from the Father, and it lands in people humble enough to have their hands open.

Aquinas turns that word “little one” over and finds three things inside it. There is the person who is lowly and overlooked, the person who is humble and thinks little of himself, and the person who is simple and uncomplicated.[7] What ties them together is that none of them is full of himself, so there is room left for God. Where there is humility, Aquinas says, there is wisdom. The scribes were the mirror image, so stuffed with their own learning that revelation had nowhere to sit down.

But why would God hide anything? It is a hard line, and Aquinas refuses to sand it smooth. He likens God to a builder setting a foundation. You can ask why the mason laid this stone here and that stone there, and eventually the only honest answer is that he willed it so.[8] God’s good pleasure is the reason. Jesus isn’t gloating over the blindness of the proud. He is praising the justice of a Father who gives sight to the humble and lets the self-made keep exactly the self-sufficiency they demanded.

Then the prayer widens into something staggering. “All things have been delivered to me by my Father.” That is a claim to divine authority, the same authority Jesus has been exercising the whole Gospel when he teaches over Moses, heals with a word, and forgives sins.[9] And it peaks in the most intimate sentence of all: “no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son.” The Father and the Son know each other all the way down, a knowledge that would have stayed locked away from us forever if the Son had not decided to open the door.[10] That is what the little ones receive. Not a lesson. God himself.

Lay the two readings side by side, and the stitching shows. Assyria could not see that its power was on loan, so it boasted like an axe. The scribes could not see that their wisdom was on loan, so they stared straight at Wisdom and saw nothing. One blindness, two outfits. And in both cases, the cure is the same small, costly thing: remembering you are the instrument.

Daily Application

This is exactly where Saint Bonaventure belongs on today’s calendar.

He was nobody’s fool. He held a senior chair at the University of Paris, wrote theology thick enough to keep scholars busy for seven centuries, and earned the title “Seraphic Doctor.” If anyone had grounds to boast like Assyria about the strength of his own mind, it was this man. He didn’t. He kept Jesus at the dead center of the teaching, the writing, and the years he spent governing the Order.[11] Bonaventure is the living answer to the idea that the Gospel’s “babes” and the world’s brilliant people sit in two different rooms. He was both at once. He simply never lost track of whose hand was swinging the axe.

That is the real challenge for most of us, because few of us wake up planning to deny God. We just quietly pocket the credit. You close the deal and feel your own competence. You raise decent kids and count your own effort. You get the diagnosis and lean on your own research. None of that is wicked. The strength of your hand is real, exactly the way Assyria’s army was real. The trap is the phrase Assyria tacked on: “by my wisdom, for I have understanding.” The second your gifts stop pointing back to the Giver, they begin to harden into idols, and idols make you dull about the things that matter most. That is the genuinely frightening edge of the Gospel. The scribes were not punished with stupidity. They were left alone with their expertise, and it walked them right past the Son of God.

So what does the Lord actually ask of you today? Humility, and not the counterfeit kind where you run down your own gifts to sound modest. Bonaventure never pretended to be dim. Real humility looks squarely at everything you can do and everything you hold and receives all of it as a gift instead of a trophy. It is the difference between an achievement and a grace. And here is the mercy hidden inside the demand: the childlike are not handed less. They are handed more. They get the Father himself, the intimate knowledge the Son came to hand over, the “these things” that stay sealed to anyone too impressed with himself to open his hands.

Try one thing this week. Take the accomplishment you are proudest of, the one you would most want credit for, and pray over it like a child instead of an expert. Thank the Father for the hand that swung through you. You lose nothing but the fiction that you did it alone, and you gain the one thing the scholars could never earn. The axe doesn’t get to boast. But an axe in a good carpenter’s hand gets to be part of something it could never have built by itself.

Notes

1. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 304.
2. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, on Isaiah 10:15 (no. 339).
3. The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, on Isaiah 10:5–19 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005).
4. Origen, Homilies on Isaiah 8.1, quoted in The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, on Isaiah 10:5–19.
5. Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 159.
6. Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 167.
7. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of St. Matthew, on Matthew 11:25 (no. 959).
8. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of St. Matthew, on Matthew 11:26 (no. 962).
9. Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 160.
10. Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 160.
11. Franciscan Media, “Saint Bonaventure,” Saint of the Day, franciscanmedia.org.