The Children’s Jesus

I asked God to guide me in tending my soul in a season that held the joy of preparing to welcome a new grandchild alongside sorrows and transitions. The bud of an idea appeared, a cloud no bigger than an adult’s hand. On one peaceful afternoon in March, I wrote it down.

It turned out to be my version of praying the hours. Inspired by the Bible and other readings, the wisdom of those I host in spiritual direction, and a renewal of a childhood practice.

Hour two starts around ten in the morning, when I pause to savor how Jesus welcomed children. How he interacted with them in ways that shocked his friends. With him, little ones were not merely grudgingly welcomed but held up as model members of God’s family.

Kids Get God’s Ways
Goodness is not reserved for the smartest but for the smallest among the Holy Three (Matthew 11:25, Luke 10:21). The Greek word often translated ‘infant’ describes a child older than a helpless newborn yet not more than three or four years old. Not because God doesn’t value wisdom but because the Father loves extravagant humility.

What if you considered God revealing heaven’s mysteries to young ones as you encounter them in your neighborhood, shopping for groceries, or attending church? Or how about this: can you imagine God welcoming three-year-old you? Not tolerating you. Not waiting for you to be old enough to be more interesting or useful. A God who reveals secrets of grace, goodness, and real life, not despite a childlike nature, disposition, and level of experience, but somehow because of those things.

Children get things about Jesus that adults find harder to understand, maybe because we’ve lost or forgotten what we once knew. Children grasp loving freely, feeling their feelings, and knowing their own image-bearing belovedness. Kids understand mercy. As Lacy Finn Borgo writes in Faith Like a Child, we, as newborns, are
"hungry and thirsty to receive the gentle goodness of others. We are merciful beyond measure, willing to forgive again and again those who cannot or will not meet our needs. Our hearts begin in the simple purity of the heavens, and we are literally wired for a peacemaking that leads to secure community."

Ideal Members of God’s Kingdom
Children are, as they were in Jesus’s day, the least. Least in stature, strength, and autonomy. The most vulnerable. Jesus’s friends were convinced they were a waste of his time (Mark 10:13-16). With holy fierceness, Jesus demanded that they let the little ones through. He held them close, undeterred by runny noses or sticky fingers. Then he held them up as the only way to approach him and his father.

He didn’t let them go without a blessing. I wonder what he said? Which words do you use to call forth goodness for the children in your life? It might be the ancient words about God’s face shining on them in delight (Numbers 6:24-27). Or they might be some of your own, drawn from what you love best about them. What do you long to hear spoken over your own life?

Kids understood the only appropriate response to Jesus’s healing presence was exuberant joy (Matthew 21:14-16). The old idea that children should be seen and not heard couldn’t have less to do with the children’s Jesus.

Children know how to receive God’s grace freely, as a gift. “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it” (Mark 10:15). They know how to open their hands to accept. Without believing they could or should earn goodness. Without leveraging gifts for power or position. Our job as adults is to learn from their good examples.

Do Not Hinder Them
We are also accountable for not getting between young ones and Jesus. We are to let them come. They don’t need our cajoling to move toward Emmanuel (Matthew 19:13-14). They know who is good for them.

We are responsible for not doing anything that hinders their steps toward love. We must remember Jesus’s words of warning about how it would be better to jump into the ocean with a boulder attached to us than risk tripping up a child (Matthew 18:6-7). We are to be vigilant for any grown-up actions or inactions that could malform a child’s image of themselves or God.

Following the good example of the children’s Jesus means becoming students of children, relearning what they know about God’s good ways. It means unlearning anything that makes us value strength, productivity, or appearance over the wonder, humility, and here-and-now presence of children. And it means fiercely guarding the freedom and safety of the children among us.

Jesus knows how to respond to the child who is loved well, if imperfectly. And the one who understands intuitively that he isn’t the favorite. To the one who doesn’t have the capacity to tell an adult that a family member is abusing her. To the idealized one, tempted to believe she must smile and charm to achieve her worth. To the child in a detention center. To the one living as a refugee or in a war zone. Jesus understands because he lived these things as both God and a human child growing up in a beautiful, broken world.

Note: The fall cohort of Spiritual Accompaniment with Children begins on August 25th. You can learn more about it here.