No place for children

“Whoever receives this child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me. For he who is least among you all is the one who is great.” Luke 9.48

The disciples had experienced some difficulty in casting out demons, and Jesus rebuked them; they were self-centered, worried about things like, it turns out, who was more important to the kingdom of God. It’s hard to cast out demons when you’re full of darkness yourself. 

And so they had the experience many of us have trying to follow Jesus: failure in religious things, full of anxiety about our place in God’s green world. Sitting in a pew sensing that, perhaps for us, the time for following God has passed. A Christianity where you aren’t sure you do enough, or that you’re pure enough, or your faith is strong enough leads to a dimming belief that you can be connected to God in any meaningful way. And this is the point at which Jesus shapes a Christianity that is unique among world religions. 

He could have said, as he had many times before, that they are not what they do, and that of course God loves them. He could have said that faith is evidence of things unseen, and that he has come that they might have life and light in darkness. All of which he had said before. But here they were, little faiths, and I imagine that the vortex of insecurity would have swallowed those words whole. What are words of affirmation, after all, for the deaf? 

So Jesus places an insurmountable obstacle in the way of their frantic resume-building: a child. 

There is something disordering about the idea of a child in the middle of our darkness that is ill-fitting. Our problems are adult-sized, our griefs are too big for children. At Anzio, during some of the fiercest fighting in WWII, American soldiers pinned down for days by German artillery, one soldier prayed aloud,"God help us. Don't send Jesus. You come yourself. This is no place for children.” 

Jesus says that if you want to get to me, you have to honor the weak. To get to me you have to consider that this child of the King has done nothing, is not qualified in any way, is part of a class that had no clout whatsoever, whose place in the synagogue was non-existent. No real persons. And yet, from the very beginning God has made clear that his promise to humanity would be realized through the improbable faith delivered to children. That the promise would not be furthered by the throne but by the crib. That invocation of God’s help and care and power is not in the eloquence of kings but the babbling of children.

A world leaning hard toward devouring itself could be toppled by a kingdom that receives children with honor. It would take the rug out from beneath our feet. There was nothing like it in the ancient world, and - frankly - nothing like it since. It would knock us clean over, an ethic where the honor of the powerless is the real and true power. It is hard to imagine the church embracing that kind of reversal, seeing as how we are the ones who knock at the door with our qualifications slung over our shoulders. Will God let us in, we wonder, when he comes into his Kingdom? Have we done well enough, faith-ed hard enough, to join upper management?   

There’s something else of course in Jesus’ placement of this child among them. If Jesus would place a child by his side then maybe it is possible that he sees us, well past our childhoods, as children too. That if there is a place for those who can add nothing but need, maybe there is a place for us next to the King. If God so loves children, then maybe he can love those of us who still act like children, who grieve like children and ask the unanswerable question like children. Maybe, if children have a place with God, we are not so far as we might think, from God. For those of us who have felt since we learned to walk, that our footing has never been truly solid, it might be that God looks at us as toddlers. One day, Jesus tells them, he will be placed in the hands of evil men and there’s nothing they will be able to do about it. The Kingdom of God would take them, like infants, to where they did not want to go. 

It’s possible, after all, that what Jesus is doing is reordering them, confronting the disciples with the one thing they could not accomplish. They could not, for all their competency and calculation, make themselves children again. Not without giving up everything they’d gained in their many years since. Not without being “the least.” The littlest. The most trusting. The safest.