On a couple of occasions in his ministry, Jesus turned to children to illustrate the nature of the kingdom of heaven. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus discovers that the twelve apostles are arguing about which one of them is the greatest. This reminds us of a constant theme in that Gospel: how the disciples get it wrong, over and over again. So, Jesus takes a child and places it in their midst, and says “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me” (Mk. 9:37).
In other words, true leadership is based on humble service, especially of the least of these, represented for Jesus by children. In a way, the child in its very nature models for the leaders what their stance should be: humility. As Jesus says, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all” (Mk. 9:35).
Our reading today, also from Mark’s Gospel, looks to children once again to reveal the nature of the kingdom. But here the emphasis is elsewhere: not on humility but on something more elusive and less spelled out. People are bringing children to Jesus to bless; again, the clumsy disciples are caught out, this time in trying to keep the children away. “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs” (Mk. 10:14). Again, Jesus takes up the children, this time to bless them. “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it”(Mk. 10:15).
So what is the quality that Jesus is commending here? What is it about children that makes them fit for the kingdom of God, and a model for the rest of us? Not just humility, as in the earlier story; here in its lack of specificity Jesus’ teaching seems to reach beyond the earlier incident with the disciples to point to something else; a quality beyond humility, commended to the disciples, that will fit them for the kingdom.
John Henry Newman once noted in a sermon that it’s a curious thing that infancy and childhood are largely unremembered by those who experience them. We experience the infancy and childhood of others, and perhaps can share those memories with them later. But we cannot access the memories of our own childhood, except in part. Newman says, “We know not what it was, what our thoughts in it were” (“The State of Innocence,” PPS, V.8). And for Newman, this fact correlates with the teaching of the First Letter of John, about the kingdom. “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed” (1 Jo. 3:2). As Newman says, “We know not what we are tending to, any more than what we have started from.” Note that John’s letter addresses its readers as “little children” throughout.
What childhood and the kingdom share is an unrealized and open-ended quality that attaches to both. We see it in the possibilities that beckon to each of us at the beginning of our lives, for instance, and the limitless quality of the kingdom promised by the Father that meets our deepest need for love. As it says in our reading from Hebrews, as it quotes Psalm 8, “You have made them for a little while lower than the angels; you have crowned them with glory and honor” (Heb. 2:7). Hebrews and the psalm take us from creation to fulfillment as the children of God. We do not know what we will be, as John says in his letter, but we do know that we will be like him because we will see him as he is.
From another angle, we could call this innocence: a state of not knowing. But I think it’s more than this: I think what Jesus is telling us is that we will be able to enter the kingdom as we take on the imaginative capacity of children. Here’s Newman again, in another sermon, “…there is in the infant soul… a discernment of the unseen world in things that are seen, a realization of what is Sovereign and Adorable” (“The Mind of Little Children,” PPS, II.6). Children believe; they can imagine the world as it might be. They are open to possibilities that the rest of us just can’t see.
The French writer Georges Bernanos says somewhere that he wants to be faithful to the child he used to be (Les grands cimetieres sons la lune. Paris, 1938). We should aspire to that kind of faithfulness: to the people we were created to be, and are still called to be, by God in Christ. Can we imagine that? Can we realize what is unrealized, through God’s grace; can we embrace the open road that leads to the kingdom of heaven, opened up to us by Jesus’ death and resurrection? This morning our confirmands are showing us the way, through their willingness to respond to the call. “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs” (Mk. 10:14).