Children were brought to Jesus
that he might lay his hands on them and pray.
Jesus loved children and wanted to welcome them and to bless them. But to his disciples this seemed superfluous, a waste of time. After all, there were people out there with real illnesses who needed healing as well as those who were genuinely possessed by demons, who could only be freed by the word of Jesus himself. These children didn't seem to need anything special from Jesus and they didn't seem to the disciples to be positioned to help advance the spread of his Kingdom. In short, this seemed to the disciples to be a waste of time for Jesus, so they tried to stop it, rebuking those who brought their children to Jesus. They had only just heard Jesus teach that it was necessary to turn and become like a child to enter the the Kingdom, but apparently they had not internalized or fully understood it.
At that time the disciples approached Jesus and said, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a child over, placed it in their midst, and said, “Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven (see Matthew 18:1-4).
The disciples had heard Jesus teach this but they seemed to still clung to their unchildlike ideas about the importance of status and efficiency. They were presumably busy calculating the optimal use time for Jesus and had their own ideas about what would be entailed by the success of his mission. But in all of this, are they so different from us? We pay lip service to the idea that to be childlike is important, but are we not often moved to rebuke when we see it in practice? We tend to insist that everything have more of a point to it than this time Jesus spent blessing children seemed to have. We are uncomfortable with simply 'wasting time' with Jesus or quietly sitting at his feet. We are wont to insist that there must always be something practical about our interactions, and we secretly hope that they all advance our own status in the Kingdom as well, so that we can look more impressive. Children being blessed for no apparent reason grates against the pride in us that still desires to earn a place in the Kingdom.
"Let the children come to me, and do not prevent them;
for the Kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these."
Just as receiving mercy ourselves requires a willingness to show mercy so too does becoming childlike ourselves require a willingness to accept children and to celebrate them as Jesus did. We must learn to see beyond what is valued by society, often status and power, to value what Jesus values. There is a real lesson here in the importance of being over doing from which we can see that our value in the eyes of Jesus is not what we earn, but rather because, as Jeremiah was told, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you" (see Jeremiah 1:5).
When we internalize the lesson of the value of children we become able to live the Little Way of Therese of Lisieux, able to do small things with great love like Saint Teresa of Calcutta. We become free because we have nothing to prove to the world. And, as a consequence of this utterly impractical attitude, they are surprisingly practical consequences as we raise future generations with a sense of worth and an assurance of love that they don't have to earn. The entire secret of Christendom may well have been the compounding of this appreciation of children from one generation to the next. And it is certainly something our society needs right now where children are beset with the anxiety of living up to all of the varied and conflicting expectations of those around them. We tend to want to do right by our children, to do everything perfectly to assure they futures. And so we must, to some extent. But let us first and foremost try to imitate this unconditional love for them of which Jesus himself is our model.
For you are not pleased with sacrifices;
should I offer a burnt offering, you would not accept it.
My sacrifice, O God, is a contrite spirit;
a heart contrite and humbled, O God, you will not spurn.
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