It has sometimes been said that if someone came up to you in the street and whispered: “They’ve found out! Run!,” nine out of ten of us would. We nearly all have secrets that we don’t want exposed — even if they are quite trivial in the cold light of day — and that phrase tells us a lot, the cold light: we don’t want to be under the kind of detached scrutiny that threatens and diminishes us, sitting under a bare light bulb being interrogated.

So when it looks as though our secrets are about to be revealed, we easily panic and run.

More seriously, there are secrets too that are terrible for us and others to face because they have to do with pain we can’t cope with; abuse, enforced silence, secrets that others make us keep.

To feel that the truth is to be revealed before we have the resource to live with it is humiliating and frightening.

Again we might properly shrink from this. But secrets are also fascinating. If someone came up to you in the street and whispered: “Go to such and such an address and you will be told the secret of your real identity,” most of us would feel at least a flicker of temptation to go and find out.

We never knew there was such a secret, a life we have never known — but what if there were?

The Gospel reading we’ve just heard is about knowing and telling secrets, discovering a truth not everyone sees.

In one way, nothing is hidden: Jesus has just been talking about what happens to the local towns that have seen his miracles and heard His words and yet haven’t changed.

It’s as though the people in these towns haven’t realised there is any mystery about who Jesus is; they look at what He does and they listen to what He says, yet they treat it as something they can think about at arm’s length, an interesting phenomenon that has nothing really to do with how they live and die.

And Jesus rounds on them and says: “I don’t want your idle curiosity or your patronage. There is a secret that you haven’t a clue about — and the ones who know that secret are the ones who don’t try to protect themselves by staying at a safe distance.”

And He might equally round on us, in what used to be called “Christendom” in the West, and say: “You have seen everything, the truth has been displayed, and yet you too react with boredom or polite curiosity. It’s all a bit too familiar. Perhaps it’s time for you to listen to some strangers.”

“You have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent,” Jesus says, “from those who make the kind of sense we can cope with. We must turn to the children; the exhausted; the ravaged and burdened and oppressed — they know the secret.”

Unless we know that you need life, we’ll be baffled; but we hate admitting our lack, our poverty.