Do we know we're children?
Learning the unintuitive cross
James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” And Jesus said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?”
And they said to him, "Appoint us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory."
Mark 10:35-37
In thinking of our gospel reading, I have been thinking about Fielda. Fielda was a beloved matriarch of our church who passed away earlier this week. Now I know full well she would not want even her funeral service to be much different from a worship service, so I hesitate to bring any attention to her in a sermon. But I have been thinking about her and her life as a teacher, thinking about all the children in our town who she loved. Among their gifts, good teachers also allow us to love them as a child, for us to experience an imperfect adult through the eyes of childlike love.
On her last morning, the strong woman with the stronger faith got the chance to fully relax into being childlike herself, tucked in bed, nurses bringing her medicine, hymns sung sweetly to her while she rested. They were precious and fitting moments for someone who knew she was a child of God and saw others the same.
I bring this up because a few weeks ago, we had a gospel reading in Mark that I didn’t get into at the time. It comes in the same chapter as today’s reading, just a few verses sooner, Mark 10:15: “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”
But in today’s Mark reading, the disciples are acting a lot like children…but not in a good way. Childish, not childlike, as some say.
Do we know we’re children?
When I was a child, one very typical child thing I did was being caught between whether I wanted to be a kid or not. I loved Nickelodeon, Goosebumps, and far more; the marketing slogan “by kids, for kids” worked like a charm. And when it was to my advantage, of course I would say things like, “Don’t blame me, I’m just a kid!” On the other hand, I dreamed like any kid dreams of growing up. I loved star athletes and had my heroes (super or otherwise), and like any kid, I would be frustrated at the things you just aren’t capable of doing until you have that double-edged status of Grown-Up. I One of the pains of childhood is being unable to transcend being a kid, weak and incapable. Of course we children want to be powerful.
The phrase “child of God” was very pivotal to me coming back to Christianity.1 But it’s one that we say so much that I have to wonder…do we actually see ourselves as children? Do we know we’re children? Because this is how Jesus sees his followers, and it’s how Paul and other New Testament writers see us, too. When we hear that phrase, it evokes a relationship with God as our Father, but I don’t know how often we notice our perennial childhood.
If we have forgotten, this story reminds us; here, the disciples are acting like children. But not childlike like Mark 10:15 calls us to be, but as children who don’t know who they are.
If we missed it, look at their dialogue reminiscent of a tyrannical tot: “Jesus, we want you to do what we say!” Jesus responds patiently, like a parent. And what do they want? Power and glory! When do they want it? Now! Mark is typically short on commentary, but I can hear in Jesus’ response a bit of amusement, like, “That’s cute.” He gives a cryptic response:
But Jesus said to them, "You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" They replied, "We are able." Then Jesus said to them, "The cup that I drink you will drink and with the baptism with which I am baptized you will be baptized, but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to appoint, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared."
Mark 10:38-40
The other disciples respond with anger that doesn’t feel righteous, but a childish indignation at a peer who wants to be the youngest crab out of the playpen’s bucket. Everybody here, then, is childish—openly selfish, honest to a fault with petty demands, blunt and straightforward. And like a good parent, Jesus says okay, I'll humor you, I’ll play this game. I imagine he does this with all our games. These are the Grown-Ups he has to work with.
Truly, few of us are much better, and grown-up is a relative term anyway. I couldn’t figure out through Googling who said this, but many have expressed a similar thought: when a baby is hungry and it cries, nobody blames the baby for its reaction to being hungry. I mean, yes, almost every parent gets frustrated at their babies, but it is fleeting; no court and no religion, and really no person in their fully conscious mind puts any blame on the baby for crying when it’s hungry, scared, or cold. We know it’s not the baby’s fault. But then, somewhere along the way, we all become adults, and we start blaming each other for our reactions when we’re hungry, scared, and cold.
Teaching the Children the Cross
We get mad at each other, but Jesus doesn’t get mad at his children here. For sure, sometimes he does; Jesus will sometimes scold them, or be really sad and disappointed like the “mother hen” he describes himself as (Luke 13:34). But he loves them. He teaches them.
And he teaches them like children. Like children, they have limited understanding, partly because they have a limited grasp of the depth of analogies. So, when these children—the disciples—hear about the kingdom of God, they think, oh… the kingdom of God is like an earthly kingdom! And there’s a ruler, with chief advisors at the left and right, who get glory and honor and power and cool things.
But the kingdom of God that Jesus knows and preaches—the one these children have not seen yet—is not like that. His kingdom is like the cross. This brings a different weight to Jesus’ words, ‘You will drink from that same cup, and you will be baptized like me.” Think of the three crosses on Calvary, where Jesus dies, then think, “Someone will be at my right, and my left…but that’s not my decision.”
(Side note: each Sunday when I preach, I get the gift that every preacher in my church has received, which is a wooden carving of the three empty crosses on the felt covering the organ pipes. The congregation does not see them unless they turn around and up.)
Christ desires to orient us and point us to a path of discipleship not caught up in childish fights and cartoonish ambitions, but the ambition to bear each other’s burdens. Jesus teaches his kids again by comparing it to something they know, rulers of this world:
“You know that [the world’s] rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.”
Mark 10:42-45
So what, my fellow kids, does it look like to serve? It looks a lot like the path towards the cross.
Most of us will fall short of that call and that standard, probably most of the time. And so many days, most of us might have the highest realistic aspiration is to move from being children to being the Good Thief on the cross, the one who says “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” (Luke 23:42) Because we are helplessly childish, helplessly a little full of it, helplessly wrong on some things, helplessly scoundrels. But like the Good Thief, we can ask for mercy. Like the Good Thief, we can start by knowing we need mercy. We can remember we need a savior, one who tells us and all other good thieves, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.”
What About Today?
As for now, we are still children. We all have and share and need our heavenly Father, who wants us to be open to learning and teaching and training. Young children are, no doubt, so many other wonderful things, too, full of pure joy, innocence, candid, not burdened with the self-conscious burdens of sin, and as often as they’re selfish, they’re sometimes just so preciously selfless. Children are intuitive and perceptive, and they pick up on so many things we overlook. And we should strive to receive the kingdom that way too.
But also, young children—just like all of us children of God—need to be taught. Because some things just aren’t intuitive to our human nature. Some things we need the Word of God to enter into our world, the Word known by the name Jesus Christ, the Word breathed into the world, not a result of just intuitions or observations like a science book, but the truly good news who entered into the world from beyond it that we might come to live the true life.
And through Jesus Christ, with his ongoing helper the Holy Spirit pointing us back to him, we children can learn who God is and what his love is like.
And how does God love us? As children. Sometimes devastatingly upset with us, sometimes heartbroken for us, but willing to do anything to save us. So what now for us? One more time: to not be childish, but childlike, loving God and love each other as children.
I think most of us Christians have phases where we take grace for granted. We have times when we at least act like we don’t really need Jesus, much less fear the Lord. Perhaps in not wanting others to feel the gospel weaponized, we begin to tell on ourselves with actions that say, “Am I really that bad? Maybe I’m not so bad that I need a savior.”
But we don’t think children are wicked just because they need a parent. But they do, and we do. For we are still vulnerable to forces much bigger than us, victims of power and influences way beyond what we can handle. No matter how grown-up we are, we are still that way. That never stops our whole lives. We get bigger and stronger and learn stuff—happy to report I can tie my shoes—and we can fend off many kinds of dangers. But my fellow children, there are so many greater Powers out there that we are not equipped to handle. We have not fought the Leviathan, as the Father reminded Job. We cannot possibly face the cosmic forces of evil by ourselves. We cannot possibly face the spiritual powers that rule the kingdoms of this earth by adopting their forms of power. And when we think we can, we usually play right into evil’s hands.
The shorthand we have for this is we are sinners in need of grace. We are also children in need of God’s mercy, protection, power, and his love.
And in his love, our Father wants all of us, his children, to love one another with a child’s love. We know how pure it was when we were kids, and we know it now when we see it. Let us rediscover and never lose that love.
How Can I Let Him?
Thinking of Fielda again, I wish I had known her when she was younger. I know in her last years, like all aging people she had to become more dependent on others, to be more like we were at our youngest. This can be a very hard transition. As Richard Alpert once said, when he aged, he had to move from “How can I help?” to “How can I let you help me?”
It’s not just the older children among us; perhaps we all need to make that shift, and not wait for it until our twilight, but now. Mark tells us how the false grown-up disciples needed to shift from “How can I be powerful?” to “How can I accept being powerless?”, from “How can I be Jesus’ Best Helper?” to “How can I let Jesus help me?”
Can we ask that?
Can we move from “How can I stay in control?” to “How can I just be a Good Thief and receive his mercy?”
Can we move from acting like we are capable of facing it all alone to asking, “Jesus, how can I let you die for me?”
Another story for another time.
Beautiful. And Richard wasn't always wrong ;)