Jesus is for the children (Mark 9.30-37)
Mark 9.30-37
“Jesus is for the children”
Ordinary 25B/September 23, 2018
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church
Tom James
I don’t know if you are familiar with the term “G.O.A.T.” I don’t mean the animal with the horns, the scruffy beard, and the undiscriminating palate! “G.O.A.T.” is an acronym: you have to picture it with all caps and with periods separating the letters. “G.O.A.T” stands for “greatest of all time.” “G.O.A.T.” has been used for a lot of different people in a lot of different human endeavors, from sports to politics to entertainment. It has to be something in the public view, of course, where judgment and speculation about “who’s the greatest” might actually happen. No one ever talks about the “greatest night watch person of all time,” or the “greatest uber driver of all time”—though maybe they should!
The first time I ever heard the term “G.O.A.T.” was in reference to Michael Jordan, whom many sports commentators thought was perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time, but of course, that has been hotly debated ever since. Full disclosure: I spent most of my teenage years in Raleigh, North Carolina, and one of my proudest boasts is that I got to see Jordan play quite a few times during his college years before anyone imagined that he would ever be called “G.O.A.T.” So I’m a little biased, there, I have to admit.
In a way, these debates about who’s the greatest of all time, not just in sports but in just about any public activity that you can imagine, are inevitable. Ours is a culture that is obsessed with greatness. It seems as if every child is taught to want to be great. And not only that but, today, many parents join them in that ambition. It’s not enough simply to be “good,” or to have a satisfying life, or to be a contributing member of society. No, more and more, we measure how successful our life is not on the basis of how satisfied and happy we are, but we measure it comparatively—have I climbed to the top? Have I distinguished myself from others? Or, more crudely, do I make more money than so-and-so, or have a better house, or better clothes? Or, perhaps, Have I been more productive? Are mine the more important causes? Am I a better person?
And the problem with evaluating ourselves comparatively, of course, is that it encourages us to adopt a very destructive sort of incentive: If I am in the habit of evaluating my life by comparing it to others, by whatever measure, I now have an interest in seeing others fall behind, or even fail. I may even want to put people down, so that I may more easily step over them.
Well. We didn’t invent this problem in the twenty-first century. Earlier in the ninth chapter of the gospel of Mark, a select group of disciples is with Jesus on a mountaintop, and there they see a remarkable vision of Jesus where his clothing and his face become bright and white, and they hear the voice of God. It was the epitome of a mountaintop experience. And, here, in our passage for this morning, it is clear that they have come down from the mountain. They have left behind this shining vision of Christ, this image of grace and power that radically equalizes them all, and have exchanged it for a petty squabble about who might be the “G.D.O.A.T.”—the greatest disciple of all time.
They know it’s petty. And we know they know it because they won’t admit to Jesus that they had been having that debate. They know that it doesn’t square at all with what Jesus had been teaching them, nor with the way he had been living among them. And, yet, the temptation, apparently, was all but irresistible. But, do you feel them? Who hasn’t been in a classroom or on a sports team or just in some group of people and felt the urge to show how smart you are, or how special you are, or maybe even how self-effacing and humble you are?
And what does Jesus do? He grabs a nearby child. Who is this kid? Maybe a child of one of the followers of Jesus. Or maybe it’s a child that just happens to be out in Capernaum, busy with the work that children in those days were expected to do.
There is a conventional way of understanding this story that, it seems to me, is all wrong. Even a lot of preachers and bible study leaders fall into this trap. It goes something like this: The disciples are obsessed with being great, but what they don’t realize is that to be great in God’s eyes, we have to have the innocence of a child. The child is the model that we should seek to follow. A little child shall lead them, as it says somewhere. So, be like a little child: innocent, humble, and open, a servant of everyone.
Except that, that’s not how children are at all! Anyone who has been a parent recently, especially when there are multiple kids involved, knows that children are just like the rest of us: they need affirmation; they need to assured of their worth, and all too often the way they get it is by pitting themselves against others—maybe their siblings—and try to carve out some advantage. Those of us who have had kids in school know that kids can be cruel to each other, and while we need to understand that the brutal competition of the playground is in part due to a developmental process, the fact remains that the child is not the most obvious counterpoint to the disciples’ petty squabbles. In fact, we might say that their problem is that they are acting like children, and we might say that our problem as a society that is obsessed with greatness and with treating life as a zero-sum competition between those who turn out to be “winners” and those who turn out to be “losers” is that we haven’t actually done a very good job of growing up.
So, why does Jesus grab a child, pulling him into his arms? What is the child supposed to teach us? What Jesus says here tells us all we need to know: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” It’s not that we’re supposed to be like children—that’s all too easy—it’s that, if we want to be followers of Jesus in the best way possible, we have to learn how to pay a little less attention to ourselves. We have to get over the habit of measuring our merits and our defects and comparing them with others, and we have to learn how to see the most vulnerable in our midst, like the child who may be all but invisible to the eyes of those who are focused on power and status.
In our time, we have a very protective attitude toward children. We are outraged when they are mistreated. When they are abused, we all demand that the perpetrators be punished and that the victims be protected. But it wasn’t always that way. In the ancient world, there were a lot of very vulnerable people, but none so vulnerable as the child. In the ancient world, there were slaves, women had virtually no rights, foreigners were often considered somewhat less than human. But children were on the very lowest rung of society. They were considered property, and though they might very well be loved and cherished by their parents, they were expected to work; they were not protected against abuse; during times of want, they could be sold, or even, in extreme cases, left to die. It was an unsentimental time, compared with ours. And, so, putting a child in their midst, embracing the child, was a way of pointing the disciples away from themselves, and toward one who needed them to step up, and pay attention to the needs of the world around them.
And there’s something more. Throughout the gospels, Jesus offers some unusual images for the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God was an image that embodied the hopes of the people for a better society and a better world. Usually, it meant the triumph of the forces of good, and, along with it, the destruction of the forces of evil. The kingdom of God was a political image, and, in particular, it had to do with the overthrow of Roman occupation. But, here, I believe Jesus is doing something more than offering an object lesson about discipleship. I believe he is giving us another one of his strange images of the kingdom of God. For he tells his disciples, in effect, that whoever welcomes a little one like this welcomes God. God is present in this vulnerable human child. God is present in this person who is treated like a piece of property. God is present in this person who is not really a person in the eyes of society, this human being who has no rights and no reliable protections, this one who is considered among the very least of the world.
This is a radically different way of thinking about God than the disciples probably wanted, or even that the mountaintop experience of a few verses before might have led them to expect. This is no majesty here, no bright light or thundering voice, no conquering warrior, no great winner, no G.G.O.A.T. (greatest god of all time) but only the most vivid example of vulnerability. And that’s where they were going to find God. Preacher Frederick Buechner once said, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Where else but the children of our world can gladness and deep hunger come together?
Who are the children in our neighborhood—who are the children that we can reach, and welcome? Jesus loves the little children—all the little children of the world: red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. Do we know them? Can we know them? Can we welcome them, and in so doing, can we find our gladness and the world’s deep hunger? I hope we will try, stepping a little outside ourselves if necessary. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
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