Reading Luke Together #38 – Become Like Children

On the heels of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, on Jesus’ vision of pridefulness vs. humility, Jesus turns to children (Luke 18:15-17), and not accidentally. Unusually for his time, Luke elevates women, and also children – but only because Jesus did! Jesus “Let the children come to me” (Luke 18:16). Earlier, he’d answered “Who is the greatest?” with “Whoever welcomes a child” (Luke 9:46).

But Jesus isn’t merely a child-welcoming guy. He adds “To such belongs the kingdom of God. Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” What could he mean? In 1538, Martin Luther, stressed by his rambunctious household of six children aged 4 to 12, puzzled over this: “What was Jesus thinking? This is too much: must we become such idiots?”

In Jesus’ day, as in ours, children were thought of as preliminary people, as if marinating, little projects in the making. But Jesus not only welcomes them, but points to them, and says adults have unwittingly been plummeting downhill into immaturity for years. Grab your plastic bucket and pail, climb the hill, and become a child if you want to be truly mature, if you want to know God.

“You believe that children know nothing, and that parents and grown-up people know something. Well, I tell you it is the contrary. It is the parents, it is the grown-up people who know nothing. It is the children who know everything, for they know first innocence, which is everything” (Charles Peguy). Children are open, they have more questions than answers, they are receptive, their jaws drop in awe rather easily. Children are under no illusions of independence. They do not hide their treasures, and they share their toys. Their calendars are not yet filled, and they are not in a hurry. Children toddle and are rather inept, and require much mercy.

Don’t romanticize childhood! Some of the daunting aspects of being around children might teach us about life with God. Children demand a response, and now. They brook no rivals for your attention. They aren’t trying to please anybody in particular, and they speak their minds quite boldly. Children may evoke a gentleness, but they are not gentle themselves. Somehow God is like such children, with an impatient, imperious cry of Now! And the urgency of that Now! attaches itself to a moral rule Christians and non-Christians can agree upon: the thought of any child suffering, being mistreated, or going hungry is simply intolerable, and so we must do something – Now!

We’ve done damage to childhood, haven’t we? Fawning over children, we segregate them into groups of other children and insist they engage in “age appropriate” activities – meaning they never are exposed to adults, to learn how to become adults. And thoughtlessly we treat children as grown long before they are ready. Neil Postman wrote of the “disappearance of childhood.” Once upon a time, there were adult “secrets” which you only learned when you were old enough to handle them. But now there are no secrets at all, and Jesus cannot have meant that we should become like today’s children who know as much or more than older adults. Jesus surely intended a kind of naivete in children, an innocence, a beautiful lack of awareness of the tawdry, complex nature of adult life.

Parents think of children as problems to be solved, as projects to be pursued, but children are mysteries to be loved. God, in the same way, is not a problem I try to solve with my brain, God is not a project I must manage or control; God is a mystery, and I am to love God the way a child loves her mother.

Jesus’ reminder that we are to become like children is lovely, humbling, hopeful. Hans Urs von Balthasar pointed out that “only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things.”

How on earth can a crusty, haggard, busy adult “become like a child”? You aren’t a victim as much as you think: you can clear your calendar. Spend time with children: watch them, get on the ground and play with them, ask them to show you a treasure, and you show them one too. Share your toys. Believe. Laugh. Play. Trust. Be awed. And… Now.