Welcoming the Child

With the hype around the royal birth this week it could be easy to forget that hundreds of thousands of children are born every day.  The new prince was one of four babies born at exactly the same moment on Monday.  Certainly the new prince will have a more opulent life than most of those born, but every child is important to God.

In the tenth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, we see Jesus teaching the crowds as He usually did. After teaching, some little children wanted to come to Jesus and be blessed by Him. The disciples did not seem to value the children and just wanted them to be gone. They were probably thinking, “Jesus is busy enough with all these adults, He does not have time to waste with these little guys. They can come back when they are older and will understand things.” Jesus criticized them and responded, “Whoever does not welcome the kingdom of God like a little child will certainly not enter it” (Mark 10:13-16).

But what does it mean to “welcome the kingdom of God like a little child”? In general we take it to mean “to welcome the kingdom of God like a child welcomes it.” That corresponds to some other words of Jesus found in Matthew’s Gospel: “If you do not change your hearts and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). A child trusts without reflecting. Children cannot live without trusting those around them. Their trust is not a virtue; it is a vital reality. To encounter God, the best thing we have is our child’s heart that is spontaneously open; that dares simply to ask; that wants to be loved.

But the phrase could also mean: “welcome the kingdom of God like you welcome a child.” In this case, Jesus would be comparing welcoming God’s presence to welcoming a child.

Welcoming a child means welcoming a promise. A child grows and develops. In the same way, the kingdom of God on earth is never a finished reality but rather a promise, a dynamic and incomplete growth process. And children are unpredictable. In the Gospel story, they arrive when they arrive, and not at the right time for the disciples. But Jesus insists that they must be welcomed because they are there. In the same way, we have to welcome God’s presence when it presents itself, whether it is at what we would consider the right time or not.

Welcoming God’s kingdom is at the heart of Christianity.  We pray it daily in the Lord’s Prayer, “thy kingdom come.”