25th Sunday of the Year, B

            Children can teach us so much.  And by that I don’t mean just patience, though certainly that is a department in which they do specialize.  But they tell us by way of a model about the whole world in which we live.  They seem to be the picture-perfect of the way the world was seemingly meant to be.  You know the old song, Bless the beasts and the children, if only the world could be the world they see.  But then, with time (often very soon), there begins to appear that tendency toward selfishness, that petulance and pouting, the temper and outrage at having their little wills crossed.  And if unchecked, if allowed to follow that tendency, the child becomes what we call “spoiled.”  What a near accurate word to begin to try to describe the world in which we live.  So very good in many ways, yet somehow tainted; somehow, like the spoiled child, a place that was supposed to be so much better. 

            Is it any wonder then that our Lord so often holds up the child to us to teach us something about the world, about how we are to live?  It seems that He is calling us all to something very much like the unspoiled child, to childlikeness, as opposed to that way of being and acting that we belittle as childish.  What is there about childlikeness that our Lord is urging us to emulate?  Is it not young children’s honesty, their teachableness, their openness to the good, their great wonder at the world, which the ancients tell is the very beginning of wisdom?

            And then there are the childish – those who never learn to face the fact of their spoiled nature, who then never seek to set things right.  Rather, as St. James described it in the second reading, they are full of jealousy and strife, murderous envy; they quarrel and fight and gossip; they think only of their own pleasures.   They follow that tendency, with which we are all born, down the road of selfishness, the road to hell. 

            That’s why the Church, following the teaching of Christ, has ever called for a new birth, insisted on people’s need to be born again.  No matter what our age when we first become Christians, we have to be washed in the waters of baptism so as to begin anew.  We need a fresh start:  birth into something more than a fallen, spoiled nature; rather, we must have a birth into the very life of God, which is absolutely incorruptible.  This is that life that never loses its quality of being childlike, whereas the tendency of the merely natural life -- even though it begins with such promise and innocence of the new-born infant -- ends up in childishness.  It gets spoiled unless helped, changed and elevated by God’s grace into a whole new order of being, a whole new kind of life.  That kind of life is the life of grace, the supernatural life of God being planted in us at baptism, taking root in our hearts and souls, nourished with the other sacraments, made more and more our own as we endeavor to live out that new life given to us by God.   

            And so, as we read today in the Gospel, after the disciples had been arguing and fussing about who was the most important, our Lord “took a little child, stood him in their midst, and putting his arms around him,” said to his followers, “Whoever welcomes a child such as this for my sake welcomes me.  And whoever welcomes me welcomes, not me, but him who sent me.”

            So, when we welcome the child, when we honor the child, when we welcome the childlike into hearts -- and these words my astound us -- we welcome God Himself!  How is that?  How can God come to us in the childlike?  The answer is as delightful as it is mysterious and even shocking:  God comes to us in the child, in childlikeness, because God is childlike.  The Eternal Child, as one great Scottish preacher often referred to the Creator of the universe, infinite in goodness and wisdom, power and glory, knowledge and love.  God is childlike.  Or, perhaps better:  the innocent child in our midst tells us much about the very heart of God.

            Surprising as it is, after thinking about it, it makes sense.  Did God not warn Adam and Eve against the forbidden fruit, the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil?  That fruit that was supposed to make us gods –“independent adults” -- in our own right, when in reality it caused us to turn away from God and the childlikeness of God.  That fruit (that is, man’s disobedience of the Creator) has led us to the bitterness of childishness and the terrible consequences of intelligent creatures, armed with so much knowledge and sophistication and with hardly a clue as to how to use it rightly -- unless we become childlike again.  Unless, we imbibe that most essential virtue that wars against what would damn us all (our pride), unless we become humble, ready to be taught, ready to learn, ready to listen, ready to be wise. 

            But that, as I have mentioned, requires, in a real sense, starting all over again:  in baptism, and in a whole life of vigilance lest we fall back into the old way of thinking and behaving, which St. James described so darkly as “vile behavior.” 

            And the things that mark and describe that new life of childlikeness St. James extols:  he refers to that wonderful, ever-young, always fresh “wisdom from above,” which is innocent, peaceable, lenient, docile, rich in sympathy and kindly deeds, impartial and sincere. 

            Some may laugh and say, “Now come on, Father, be realistic, the world really never can be the world children see.”  Okay, I answer, I don’t argue with you on that.  But I am not talking to you about this old world, but about a whole new world that begins here and here, in our heart and minds; it begins and grows in God’s family the Church, until one day it will completely replace the old world, our good old world around us so tragically spoiled by sin.  For spoiled things, good as they were and still are, spoiled things eventually decay and die.  The old in fact is already passing away; the new has been born in Jesus Christ, who is the first fruits of the new creation.  The old, tired, whining childishness is passing away; childlikeness is to take its place.  And we have to be childlike in order to see it and receive it and to know the great joy of living it.  We must change our hearts, Jesus Himself warned His hearers, lest we perish.

            Receive, then, and welcome the child; for whoever welcomes the child -- childlikeness -- welcomes Christ, the Son, the Child of God.