And the people were bringing children to Jesus so that he might touch them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this he became indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me; do not prevent them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Amen I say to you, whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it.” Then he embraced them and blessed them, placing his hands on them.” (Mark 10.13-16)
Last month, minister and dean at the Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville Yolanda Pierce shared an experience that she had with her young daughter some years ago after they had moved from the big city into a smaller town. Having planted some flowers to attract hummingbirds, the mother and daughter decided one morning to check if there were any butterflies. However, as soon as they opened the door, a frog hopped into their living room and, after a few hops, ended up in Yolanda’s office.
Being a city girl and not knowing anything about frogs, Yolanda grabbed her daughter’s hand and ran to the neighbor’s house for assistance, needing a plan on how to rid their house of this uninvited guest. When the neighbor opened his door, Yolanda and her daughter said the same thing at the same time, “There’s a frog in our house.”
But, as she noted, the words may have been the same, but they weren’t said in the same way. Yolanda’s words indicated that the frog was an intruder, unwanted and uninvited. Her daughter’s words, on the other hand, were filled with excitement, awe, and glee. Where Yolanda saw a problem, her daughter saw an opportunity. And whereas Yolanda saw in the frog an intruder, her daughter saw the frog as a guest. “I felt nothing but exasperation,” Yolanda wrote, while her daughter “was filled with delight.”
That experience catapulted Yolanda into thinking about the verse in Matthew’s gospel where Jesus says to his listeners, “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (18.3), forcing her to face the fact that somewhere along the way she had “failed to appreciate the appearance of one of God’s little creatures after a summer rain.” As she said, “If out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks, our words and our tone often reveal that we’ve lost the humor, joy, and pleasure of those small moments when God’s imprint is revealed.”
We find the disciples’ showing the same lack of humor, joy, and pleasure in the selection from Mark’s gospel that is put before us today, these few verses very much like those that are found in Chapter 18 of Matthew’s gospel. Both writers tell the story of Jesus’ interaction with children. However, unlike that found in Matthew where Jesus calls a child over, Mark’s version has parents bringing the children to Jesus for a blessing.
One other difference stands out. Here in Mark’s telling of the story, the disciples “rebuke” the parents, clearly unhappy to have the children paraded in front of the Teacher for a blessing. Their thinking, in all likelihood, was that Jesus had better things to do and shouldn’t be disturbed by what they see as a distraction or a nuisance.
Jesus’ reaction to the disciples’ is as equally harsh as theirs was to the parents, Mark telling us that Jesus “became indignant” at his disciples, the word meant to convey his anger at them. He is incensed that they have rebuked the children and he commands them, “Let the children come to me.” As the disciples step aside, allowing the children to come forward, Jesus “embraced them and blessed them.”
Mark and Matthew agree on one critical point of the story. Both state that Jesus uses the incident to teach the disciples an important lesson about the kingdom of God, one that they are slow to learn. Here we hear him say to them, “Do not prevent them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” In Matthew he says, “Unless you turn and become like children you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”
In both instances, Jesus makes clear that the kingdom of God belongs to those who think like children, who see the world as children see it, a place filled with wonders and wonderful things, butterflies and leaping frogs, a place flooded with the grandeur of God who makes all creatures great and small. Unlike the cynical and jaded disciples, children see the giftedness of God everywhere and in everything, Christmas morning put before them every single day.
Mark tells us that Jesus embraced the children. In other words, he took them into his arms. And in wrapping his arms around them, he made it clear to his disciples–then and now–that he saw children as worthy of imitation, their wonder at the world and their openness to the grandeur of God something grown-up and grown-old people need to find again.
Sadly, somewhere along the way we begin to take it all for granted, God’s abundance no longer seen as a gift, but simply as an ordinary occurrence. And rather than receiving it as a gift from a loving God, we take it as just another day. With that attitude, of course, we train ourselves to turn a blind eye to the many good things God sends us and, in the process, we no longer find God in our midst although his presence is in the air we breathe, in the water we drink, and in the stars that shine in the sky on a dark night.
All are gifts, meaning we don’t have to work for them. They are given to us by a God who loves us and who loves his creation. We simply have to open our eyes, open our ears, and open our hearts to receive them as gifts, the same as a child who opens the door and finds a frog on the front step, ready to jump inside the house.
If we have become blind to the beauty and the bounty that God gives us, then the remedy may be found in Jesus’ words, “Let the children come to me.” Spend a few minutes with children and we begin to see the world in a whole new way. The scales fall off our eyes as they share with us the many things that they see around them, things we overlook every day.
That lesson came home to me the other day when some good friends stopped by for a short visit, bringing their two young children with them. Not wanting to be confined to the house for the boredom of grown-up talk, the boy and girl ran outside to explore the yard, hunting for treasures. And they found treasures everywhere. They marveled at the monarch butterflies flying through the air, the little girl giggling as she tried to catch one in her hand, never tiring of reaching out to these ethereal creatures, wanting to touch one of them. She stayed underneath the trees for an hour, never tiring, always running with the butterflies. I also had seen them the day before, but never stopped to look at them, and surely had never considered spending an hour with them.
Meanwhile, her brother, seeing a sprinkler splashing water on the lawn, stood within its spray, laughing out loud as the water coated his face and clothes with the cool drops. He didn’t even bother to take off his glasses, but allowed them to be washed in the water like his skin was. I had never seen such delight except on the neighbor’s dog when it also would jump into the spray of water, dancing in the spray like a dolphin in the sea. And I thought of the many times I had suffered through a splash of water as I moved the sprinkler from one place to another, trying my best not to get any of it on me.
At one point, the young boy rushed into the house to show us an acorn he had found beneath an oak tree, so proud of his find, more valuable to him than a hundred dollar bill. Showing us the acorn, eyes sparkling with delight, he asked if he could keep it. Laughing, I answered he could have as many as he wanted. His eyes grew round as saucers, not believing his good fortune, repeating what I said, but in question form. When I assured him he could have more than one, he rushed out the door to fill both his hands with acorns, jumping up and down with joy. And I pondered how many times I expressed annoyance when one of them hit the blade of my mower.
As we took a short walk to a nearby church, the children found more to celebrate outside the walls than inside, the little girl hopping with glee when a grasshopper appeared in the grass in front of her feet, asking her mother if she could bring the grasshopper home with her, wanting it for a pet. As the grasshopper jumped away each time she bent low towards it, she giggled, amused by her new playmate.
And when my dog, not used to having young children in the house, wouldn’t play with her, she looked puzzled as much as sad, finding it impossible to believe that a dog wouldn’t want to bounce around the yard in the same way that she did, perplexed how a puppy wouldn’t want to have as much fun as she was having.
It was an afternoon of lessons taught to me by two small children who didn’t even know that they were teaching the adults something very important, something we had forgotten how to do, how to play in the paradise that God had created for us. And I understood at that moment why the Book of Genesis says that God walked every afternoon in the garden with the man and the woman that he had created. It made perfect sense. Unsullied and unspoiled, these new creatures were like children, and he delighted in their delight as they strolled down the paths of the garden, smitten by snapdragons and sparrows and long-legged spiders. And, without a doubt, God found it very good.
In telling the story of the unexpected appearance of the frog on her front step, Jolanda Pierce says that her lovely neighbor accompanied her and her daughter back to their house where he gently caught the frog in his hands and returned it to the great outdoors. It was all done in five-minutes’ time. But, as Yolanda also said, it was enough time for her daughter and the daughter of the neighbor to name the frog and to decide it was their friend.
So, for weeks afterward, the two little girls would check the garden carefully to check for any signs of their newfound friend or, for that matter, any other small creature that might grace their day by its sudden appearance before them as they played in the garden, loving it exactly as God hoped they would. They understood, better than most, that the world was “charged with the grandeur of God,” as the poet once said, a man who apparently had kept his eyes and ears open as only children can do.
The evangelist ends his story with a beautiful image, telling us that “Jesus took the children into his arms and blessed them by placing his hands on them.” At first glance, the story almost appears inconsequential, requiring only three verses to tell it. And yet, truth be told, it may be one of the most important stories in the whole of the gospels, reminding us that if we ever want to find our way back to the garden, we might want to start looking at our world in a wholly different way.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 