The last two Sunday’s that I have preached, the central figure of the Gospel text in Mark has been the child. The image still stirs me. Unlike in our modern relatively affluent western world in which the child is almost deified, In Mark’s world the child is of no account, having no social status. Many children in the Ancient Middle East were sold into slavery so their families could survive in a world in which wealth was held by the less than one percent. So the child becomes a symbol to Mark of all of the marginalized and dispossessed of our world, and Jesus according to Mark is calling for a radical change in such a social order. In the Gospel of Luke the symbol of all the abased and dispossessed is a poor pregnant unmarried teenage girl who would rank socially as low as one could go. For Mark and Luke it is in receiving blessing and dignifying these the least of us which ushers in the commonweal of God, and our own entrance into it. It is this sort of imagery and the rhetorical force it carries that makes the gospels treatises on the socio-economic and political systems in which we live and move and have our being. We as people of faith have much to say to our world and the way it works.
The child bears the kingdom; the pregnant unmarried teenager bears the son of God who will teach us that it is in receiving our least that we find abundant life. It is as if God sees humankind, and perhaps even the planet itself as one organism, one living and breathing utterly contingent bio-synthetic realm, both animate and inanimate, in which all things are of the same genesis, all things intimately kin….and unless all of the whole are brought to wholeness….Jesus’ words for such wholeness are “received, welcomed and blessed”….unless there is, in short, salvation for all, then none of us are saved, because part of the body still suffers the indignities of a world that chooses wealth and power as the norm of living an abundant life, which engenders life stifling injustice and violence. We all share in the wounds of our world, the shame and the pain.
The norm, the world set right according to our sacred lore, is that wealth and power are shared in gracious mutuality…that no one’s head is lowered in unworthiness…that the rubric of life itself is to welcome, receive and bless those who do not share our social status, on a macro and microcosmic scale…we must receive the so-called kingdom as a child…not we the child…but the kingdom incarnate in the child, the lost ones of our world. We are to live into faithful maturity recognizing through our learning and practice “quick-eyed” (Herbert) that this counter-cultural teaching of the gospels is in fact the only way the human race and the planet will be sustained and survive. I believe the stakes are that high. So in all your work, in every way that you live your life, welcome, receive, and bless the child, because the ever impending birth, the ever impending emergence of God’s reign depends upon it. It will come in no other way.
