Why does God always favor empty hands rather than full ones?

Matthew 11:25–30

²⁵At that time Jesus also said: «I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and revealed them to little children. ²⁶Yes, Father, I bless you for it has pleased you so. ²⁷All things have been handed over to me by my Father; no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son has chosen to reveal him. ²⁸Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. ²⁹Take my yoke upon you, and receive my instruction, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. ³⁰For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.»

Jesus has just passed through towns where he performed dazzling miracles—the blind seeing, the sick raised—and nothing changed. People watched, perhaps applauded, and went on their way as before. One might expect him to be overwhelmed, almost discouraged to see so much evidence fall into indifference. But at the very moment when he could collapse in disappointment, he does the opposite: he looks up and gives thanks. He gives thanks because, while the learned and the clever looked away, simple people, without title or prestige, had recognized in him something no one had taught them to see. And it is there, in this contrast between apparent failure and real joy, that he opens his heart to the Father and invites the weary, the burdened, those who can bear no more, to come and lay their burdens down with him.

Why does God always favor empty hands rather than full ones?

What Saint Thérèse of Lisieux filled with her own littleness in order to finally understand Jesus' prayer of jubilation

One evening in the year 33, on the road along the Sea of Galilee, a man witnessed the failure of a lifetime of miracles. He stopped, looked up, and said thank you. Nineteen centuries later, in a Carmelite cell where her ailing lungs were already gasping for air, a young French nun scribbled the same certainty in a notebook, using almost the same words: what the great miss, the humble receive as a gift. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux never commented on this passage as an exegete. She lived it from within, making it her entire spiritual doctrine, the very one that earned her, a century after her death, the title of Doctor of the Church. She sees in the Hymn of Jubilation what no one before her had dared to take so literally: that smallness is not an obstacle on the path to God, but the door itself — and that the more destitute one is, the more chances one has of entering.

A joy that springs up at the worst possible moment

First, we must consider what Jesus has just been through. He has traveled through Chorazin, Bethsaida, Capernaum—the towns by the lake, where he gave the most visible signs of his mission. Blind people received their sight before these people. Lepers were cleansed before their very eyes. And yet nothing has changed in their hearts. Matthew records the stern words Jesus addresses to them just before the Hymn of Rejoicing: woe to these towns that have seen more wonders than Tyre and Sidon and have not moved an inch. It is an admission of failure, almost a lament. And it is precisely at this moment, without any soothing transition, that the text shifts: «I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children» (Matthew 11:25). Jesus' joy does not arise despite the failure of the experts; it arises because of the discovery of the humble. It is a shift in perspective, not a consolation of withdrawal.

Saint Teresa, too, experienced this kind of upheaval. Her entire spiritual adolescence was haunted by a question that was anything but theoretical: why do some souls receive immense graces, while others receive nothing, and where did she herself fit into this seemingly unjust order? In the manuscript she wrote out of obedience during the summer of 1897, a few months before her death, she recounts how this question troubled her for so long. The text she wrote then—the third and last of her three autobiographical notebooks, known as Manuscript C, addressed to her prioress, Mother Marie de Gonzague—is not a theological treatise. It is the intimate account of a twenty-four-year-old Carmelite nun, suffering from tuberculosis, who knew she was going to die, and who wanted to leave her sisters the secret she had spent years uncovering. She recounts how this anguish was resolved one day by a simple image she borrowed from the garden: «I understood that all the flowers created by it are beautiful, that the brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not diminish the fragrance of the little violet, nor take anything away from the charming simplicity of the daisy.» What Jesus gives thanks for having hidden from the wise, Thérèse finds again in a bed of flowers: the disproportion between souls is not an injustice, it is a garden where every smallness has its rightful place, loved for what it is.

She goes even further in this same manuscript, when she formulates what will become her most famous doctrine: «I want to find a way to go to Heaven by a short, straight, little path, a completely new little path» (Manuscript C, 2v). She has just had an almost childlike intuition, almost comical in its simplicity: in an era when elevators are replacing staircases in grand houses, why not also seek an elevator to ascend to God rather than painfully climbing, step by step, the austere ladder of perfection? Her answer is contained in a sentence that has resonated throughout the twentieth century and continues to move readers who are neither Carmelites nor mystics: «The elevator that will lift me to Heaven is your arms, Jesus!» This is not a poetic flourish. This is precisely the movement of the Gospel according to Matthew: Jesus blessing his Father for having hidden from the wise what he reveals to little children, immediately followed by the invitation, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened" (Mt 11:28). The elevator is those arms.

What the small way changes in concrete terms in a life

Giving up growing up in order to be carried

The first thing that Thérèse's reading overturns is the idea that one must first become worthy in order to be loved by God. Almost all of us carry, somewhere deep down, this vague conviction that we must earn divine attention through effort, accumulated virtues, and measurable progress. Thérèse, however, directly reverses this logic: "That is why I don't need to grow up; on the contrary, I must remain small, I must become more and more so." The statement is surprising, almost shocking, in a culture that values achievement and self-mastery. But it echoes exactly what Jesus proclaims in his Hymn: it is not the wise and the intelligent who receive revelation—they rely on their own resources—but the little ones, those who, precisely, have nothing to offer.

Let us think of someone who, after years of trying to "succeed" in their spiritual life—praying more, better, longer, accumulating good resolutions—finds themselves one evening exhausted, unable even to formulate a proper prayer, and who ends up simply saying, "I can't do it, just accept me as I am." This is precisely the gesture Thérèse describes. She doesn't ask for the strength to climb the stairs faster. She asks to be carried. And it is this seemingly small request that becomes her strength.

The disproportionate distribution of favors is not an injustice

The second shift concerns our relationship to comparison—that reflex that constantly urges us to measure our spiritual progress, or simply our worth, against that of others. The passage about the flowers in the garden, in Manuscript C, directly addresses this temptation: «So it is in the world of souls, this living garden of the Lord. He saw fit to create great saints who can be compared to lilies and roses; but he also created smaller ones, who must be content to be daisies or simple violets destined to delight his divine gaze when he lowers them to his feet. The more happily the flowers do his will, the more perfect they are.» This is not a sad resignation—it is a joy. For Teresa, perfection is not measured by the size of the flower but by its willingness to be what it is.

This is what Saint Augustine, fourteen centuries earlier, had already touched upon while meditating on the same passage from Matthew in his Confessions. After describing his long intellectual wandering among the philosophers, unable to find peace through the power of his own mind alone, he pauses on this verse and applies it to himself with a lucidity that has lost none of its force: «You have hidden these things from the wise, and revealed them to the simple, so that the afflicted might come to him and be relieved. For he is gentle and humble in heart» (Confessions, VII, 9). This great mind, trained in the finest rhetoric of his time, admits that his philosophical books, however brilliant they may have been, contained nowhere this simple phrase: «Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened.» One had to descend from one's erudition to hear it. A philosophy professor who, after years of scholarly reading on the meaning of life, one day gets down on her knees and weeps before a very simple truth - that, almost word for word, is the experience of Augustine.

Accepted weakness becomes a point of unity, not an obstacle

The third and most intimate aspect concerns how Thérèse inhabits her own fragility—physical, psychological, and spiritual—without trying to conceal it or constantly apologize to God. A saying from the desert sheds unexpected light on this movement. Abba Moses the Ethiopian, a former brigand who became one of the most revered Fathers of the Scetis Desert, told his disciples, according to the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, that the monk must «die to his neighbor» so as not to judge anyone—a sign that true spiritual wisdom always begins with a stripping away of judgment about oneself and others, never with an accumulation of merits. It is the same gesture, across centuries and worlds: wisdom according to God begins where the pretense of judging oneself worthy ends.

Thérèse sums it up with almost provocative clarity: «The good Lord cannot inspire unattainable desires, therefore I can, despite my littleness, aspire to holiness.» She doesn’t say: I will become great to merit holiness. She says: my very littleness is the ground on which God can act, precisely because it offers no resistance to his grace. This is exactly what Jesus proclaims in his Hymn: it is not in spite of their littleness that the little ones receive revelation, but because their littleness does not create a barrier.

Imagine someone going through a period where everything is falling apart—fragile health, professional failure, a feeling of worthlessness—and who, instead of continuing to fight to prove their worth, ends up accepting this weakness as a potential meeting place rather than a source of shame to hide. It's an immense inner shift, almost counterintuitive in a society that values performance above all else. And this is precisely what Teresa experienced in her Carmelite cell, ill and now incapable of the great heroic deeds she had dreamed of performing for God: she discovered that this very powerlessness was not an obstacle to holiness, but its most fertile ground.

What remains, once we've let that joy in

What this meditation offers is not a method to apply, but a perspective to change. We stop seeking proof of our worthiness before daring to approach. We stop comparing our own measure of grace to that of others, as if there were a universal scale of holiness. We learn, very slowly, to accept our own smallness instead of fighting it as a flaw to be corrected before we can truly pray. This is a learning process that takes time, because everything in our ordinary lives pushes us in the opposite direction: we must earn it, we must prove ourselves, we must grow. The Gospel, and Thérèse following in its footsteps, say the opposite with disconcerting tranquility.

The reception of this Teresian insight within the tradition was spectacular and rapid. Less than a century after her death in the near anonymity of a small Carmelite convent in Normandy, the Church proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church in 1997—one of the few women to receive this title, alongside Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena—precisely because her «little way» was recognized as a genuine doctrinal development, capable of illuminating the Gospel for entire generations of believers who felt too ordinary, too weak, too unheroic for holiness. She made accessible what the Hymn of Jubilation had already proclaimed: that the Kingdom is not conquered from above, but received from below, with open and empty hands.

Saint Teresa, in one of the last pages she wrote before dying, sums it all up in a sentence that needs no comment: "Leaving to great souls and great minds the beautiful books that I cannot understand, and even less put into practice, I thank God for being small, since only children and those who resemble them will be admitted to the heavenly banquet."«

Lectio divina

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