Earlier this week I took some time to wonder about the Gospel reading for this Sunday, as it dealt with Divorce. What I did not note or focus on at all was that Sunday's Gospel actually includes another brief pericope (probably included because it is short so likely would not get its own Sunday, and so preachers have more options for preaching on when it comes to a really tough text like this one). I thought I'd share a few thoughts on that text as well.
13 People were bringing little children to Jesus to have him touch them, but the disciples rebuked them.14 When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. 15 I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it." 16 And he took the children in his arms,put his hands on them and blessed them.
Now I'm not as big into those attempts to make too much of the two pericopes being together. I think there are ways we can use them together, but making too much of it is in my estimation overplaying their relation together. It is clearly episodic: Pharisees test Jesus, Jesus and Disciples go into a house where they discuss the topic further, and now people start bringing children to Jesus. The implication that they are bringing the children to Jesus could suggest Jesus is still in the home where he taught the disciples, but Jesus' anger and teaching around the children seems to me to be clearly isolated from their previous discussion on divorce. I bring this up because a lot of commentaries I think make too much of Jesus talking about divorce affecting vulnerable women by treating them as worthless and now the 'worthless' children (who held little social value then) Jesus advocates for. As I noted in the other blog, Jesus does not use any language of decrying injustice in that instance but actually names sexual fidelity, and he targets not only the man who puts the woman away for another but the woman who leaves the man for another. Thus there is far more than the societal impact on the vulnerability of women that is at play in Jesus' teaching on divorce.
I think the same should be said about children. It is true that children were also at the bottom of the social totem pole, and that they were not highly valued. But if we make too much noise around Jesus inviting them or make that a "value" claim, we may be saying more than we intend (or even if we intend, more than we should). And worse off, we will misinterpret what Jesus actually does and says. If it becomes about "value" the temptation is not to make it being about Jesus desiring the children regardless of their value - or lack therefore. Instead it becomes about Jesus seeing some value we don't see. And the message is of a worth we (or at least children) possess instead of the divine intention of Christ to not treat us according to value, worth, potential, etc. God's love gets turned into God's ability to see what others cannot, instead of a truly unconditional love.
Bo Giertz perhaps identifies this best when he says:
Jesus takes even the small children up in His arms and blesses them. The disciples object when the children are first brought forward. They give the reason: What can these little creatures grasp of the great Master's message? But Jesus has a different opinion: "The kingdom of God belongs to such ones." We great and wise people prefer to turn these words upside down and say, "such ones belong to the kingdom of God," thus to rescue a bit of man's honor, for then at least the small children have been explained to have a right to God's kingdom by virtue of some innocence or some purity or some other good thing which should therefore reside in human nature from the beginning. Then, we think, perhaps it is still found in me, and finally we conclude that conversion is not altogether necessary! But Jesus says otherwise: "The kingdom of God belongs to them." The great, undeserved gift - the Savior coming down to earth bringing new life and heavenly atonement - is given by God's command to these children, who are born of flesh and belong to the world of sin and mortality. There is no question of some romantic view about children that is out of touch with reality. Rather, the blessed truth is that God's salvation reaches also these, who can neither consider nor understand what is happening to them.
Giertz rightly sees a difference between whether or not the kingdom belongs to them because of Christ or they belong to the Kingdom by right. And while we may not always word it the way Giertz identified the temptation to do so, the minute it becomes about seeing worth, this can become the path. If Christ sees worth in them...maybe he sees it in us. Or maybe we at least had worth and repentance is returning to that worth. The movement is away from the actual Gospel story, away from even this pericope where they come forward by Christ's choosing, and are blessed because he blesses them. It moves away from this into some philosophical notion of human dignity. Those who feel outcast, are only so because they've been made to believe that. But that idea does not lead to a real cross. Instead of the message being about God's gracious acting, it is about us simply reevaluating ourselves or others.
We can talk about how society placed a "value" on children. But not to contrast it to the value Jesus sees but to contrast it to the fact that Christ's acts, his blessings, and his death were never something to be earned or based on some form of human value. They were based on God's intention to enter into this world, not to rescue our system of values and equality but to rescue us from the real sins that transgress even the most straight moral thinking. He did not call the children forward to move us into a modern world of value, but to move them and us into the kingdom of God itself.
How do we receive the kingdom like a child? Not by trying to become one, or find the worth they have, but as uncontrollably as they do. By being taken before the living Christ, blessed, given a promise. Becoming like a child is not steps we take to make ourselves children (that's as ridiculous a notion as trying to climb back up your mother's womb to be born again), it's the actions of those whom our life depends. Just like our desire to find some spark of value to make the kingdom ours, so is our desire to make ourselves like children a failure to receive Christ. Every effort to put ourselves in that state will in fact take us from it, because little children (the word here in Mark for little children can include infants, Luke's Gospel in fact is explicit that it is infants) don't put themselves at Christ's feet they are taken there. What Jesus speaks about, what can be seen from children, is that the kingdom comes from outside of us. And it is given, as is a child's life and care. Instead of trying to somehow find what children have so that we can find it in ourselves too, the idea is precisely the opposite, they don't have it...that's why they receive the kingdom of God. That's why Christ takes us in his arms. All of us. Our sin. Our deaths. Our cross. He takes it, and he gives us the kingdom.
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