Like Children

It’s been very interesting to hear some people complaining about the idea of paying for the health care costs of illegal aliens, and even of legal aliens, for that matter.  I guess it doesn’t occur to those folks that it might not be a good idea to have millions of sick people walking around passing their illnesses onto us.  Or that we’ll still end up paying for them when they end of up having to go to the emergency room for treatment, which bogs down the trauma centers and makes health care more expensive for all of us.  You can only judge a society by how it treats its weakest members.  Even most animals take care of their sick and injured.

I guess that’s because most people are just sort of wrapped up in themselves.  I know I tend to be.  We look at everything by how it affects us.  What is this new law going to do to me?  How will this new tax affect me?  I suppose it’s only natural. But of course, we also spend a lot of our lives being miserable, too.  Maybe there’s another way.  That’s what Jesus was teaching.

Jesus and his disciples left from there and began a journey through Galilee,
but he did not wish anyone to know about it.
He was teaching his disciples and telling them,
“The Son of Man is to be handed over to men
and they will kill him,
and three days after his death the Son of Man will rise.”
But they did not understand the saying,
and they were afraid to question him.

They came to Capernaum and, once inside the house,
he began to ask them,
“What were you arguing about on the way?”
But they remained silent.
They had been discussing among themselves on the way
who was the greatest.
Then he sat down, called the Twelve, and said to them,
“If anyone wishes to be first,
he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.”
Taking a child, he placed it in the their midst,
and embracing it, he said to them,
“Whoever accepts one child such as this in my name, accepts me;
and whoever accepts me,
accepts  not me but the One who sent me.”

Here’s the master, right?  Here’s the teacher.  Here’s the holy Joe, and he says he is going to suffer a lot and be killed.  And they’re arguing about which one of them is the best student!  They seem to be missing the entire point.  It must have driven Jesus nuts!  He kept trying to tell these guys shit and they kept showing time and again how much they didn’t understand the message Jesus was teaching them.  I think I would have told them to go fuck off, frankly.  As a teacher, I have to confess that from time to time, when I’m working with a student who still doesn’t understand something very simple (like simple addition, for example, 3+5) no matter how many times or how many ways you explain it to them and illustrate it for them, I want to ask, “I’m sorry but does it hurt to be that stupid?  Is there actually pain?”  But then I know they would just look at me with those dumb puppy sort of eyes as if to ask, “What?”

So Jesus brings this kid over, wherever he came from, and embraces the kid and says, “Look.  When you accept this kid as a friend, an equal, then you accept me.  You accept God.  Got it?”  Because when Jesus and his pals were around, children were the absolute least important people in the world.  They were even less important that beggars and cripples.  It wasn’t like today, when we worship children, where we believe that “the children are our future.”  Back then, children could do very little useful work.  A whole lot of them died.  They were basically a drain on society.  Jesus says to embrace the lowest of the low, people who can’t possibly repay you in any way, and treat them like friends.

Consider children for the moment.  I won’t spread any of that bullshit that children are innocent.  They aren’t innocent.  They may be naïve, but they aren’t innocent.  They lie.  They steal.  They are cruel to one another and small animals.  They’re cruel to big animals.  They are most often totally selfish beings.  But they do have faith.  They have faith in us.  Kids always look to us to solve their problems.  They depend on us for their survival.  They don’t walk around doubting that mom and dad are going to feed them and clothe them.  Even the children of the homeless seem to have faith that mom is somehow going to take care of them.  They don’t run away and strike off on their own.

When children come to their parents, they do so with total trust, at least until the grownups in their lives screw up enough and they learn that they can’t depend on them forever.  And I guess that’s when we really grow up, when we lose that trust.

And when we accept children, there is never a question that we will take care of them.  I doubt that there are many of us who would just walk away from any child in need.  We look at these helpless beings and we just naturally try to help out to the extent that we can.  We bring lost children back to their parents, or at least to someone who can help find the parents.  We see a crying child and we ask what’s wrong.  We try to comfort them.  Who amongst us wouldn’t share what food you had with a kid in need standing in front of you?  Jesus is saying we should treat everybody like that.

And when we accept God, maybe we should try to do so in the same way children accept the grownups in their lives.  They aren’t always happy with what the grownups do.  They don’t always like the choices the grownups make.  But they still trust them to take care of them.   Consider the lilies, Jesus said.  Consider the birds.  Maybe we should learn to trust a little more.  Maybe we need to learn to accept.  I know I do.

The Greek word translated as “accept” or “receive”, means to take someone, embrace someone, accept someone, as a friend.  And that means we accept them as equals.  You don’t receive your friend as an inferior.  You don’t take on a position of superiority.  If you do, you’re not being a friend.  You’re being a mentor, or something like that, but you’re not being a friend.  We receive our friends as friends, as equals.  We need to see one another as true equals.  Indeed, we need to see the least of us, the most helpless, the lowest of our low, as equals.  Jesus says that when we do that, we accept them as God.  This is how God accepts us.  Jesus said, “I call you friends.”  No greater love is this, that you lay down your life for your friends.” That’s the story of Jesus, laying down his life for his friends.  That was his message.  That was his life.  And even if you don’t buy the story as fact, the truth of the story remains.

We find peace in service to others.  The truth of the message is that love heals the world.  Love comes to you when you give love away.  Worrying and arguing about who is the greatest still has us wrapped up in ourselves.  Peace comes from reaching out to others.  The people who are truly great in our world, the ones we all admire, are the ones who made servants of themselves, the ones who put the rest of us first.  If we want to make the world a little better and find a little happiness for ourselves, we have to reach out to the most marginal among us, even if it means they’re illegal aliens, I guess.