Answered and said. — The phrase is more or less a Hebraism, implying that the words rose out of some unrecorded occasion. St. Luke connects them (Luke 10:17-24) with the return of the Seventy; but as their mission is not recorded by St. Matthew, it seems reasonable to connect them, as here recorded, with the return of the Twelve, and their report of their work (Mark 6:30; Luke 9:10). Their presence, it may be noted, is implied in the narrative with which the next chapter opens. The words, however, were probably repeated as analogous occasions called for them.
I thank thee. — Literally, I confess unto Thee — i.e., “acknowledge with praise and thanksgiving.” The abruptness with which the words come in points to the fragmentary character of the record which St. Matthew incorporates with his Gospel. The context in St. Luke implies a reference to the truths of the kingdom which the disciples had proclaimed, and makes special mention of the joy which thus expressed itself. The two grounds of that joy are inseparably linked together. The “wise and prudent” (comp. the union of the same words in 1 Corinthians 1:19) were the scribes and Pharisees, wise in their conceit, seeking men’s praise rather than truth as truth, and therefore shut out from the knowledge that requires above all things sincerity of purpose. The “babes” were the disciples who had received the kingdom in the spirit of a little child, child-like, and sometimes even childish, in their thoughts of it, but who, being in earnest and simple-hearted, were brought under the training which was to make them as true scribes for the kingdom of heaven. He, their Lord, taught them as they were able to bear it, giving (to use St. Paul’s familiar image) the milk that belonged to babes (1 Corinthians 3:2); but beyond His personal teaching there were the flashes of intuition by which (as, conspicuously, in the case of Peter’s confession, Matthew 16:17) new truths were suddenly disclosed to them, or old truths seen with increasing clearness.