Tuesday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time
In the gospel for today, Jesus speaks of the need to become like children. If we do so, he says, it will make it much easier for us to receive God. It seems to me that Jesus’ words in the scripture for today can easily be misunderstood or misrepresented. First, Jesus might be taken to be saying that we should remain ignorant of the truth, but that would be a mistake. Children are not ignorant. They know many things, and they are very eager to know more and more about the world around them and the people in their lives. It seems to me that adult Christians, if we really desire to love God, will want to learn more and more about God and the world that God has created. The other mistake is to see Jesus as saying that we must develop a servile attitude towards others and allow ourselves to be taken advantage of. This too would be a mistake. We are called to live out our love for God in the service of others, yet we should experience this service as liberating and life giving and not as a life of bondage and servitude.
I am reminded here of the philosopher Nietzsche, who famously criticized Christianity because he saw it as glorifying weakness and allowing for weak people to gain control over other weak people. Yet this is a mistaken view of Jesus’ message. As Christians, we are not called to deny ourselves out of some morbid love of suffering but rather because it serves a higher purpose. The point of Christian humility is to lead us to greater love for God and our fellow human beings. As evidence of this, Christianity points to the example of Jesus himself. Jesus demonstrated his power most clearly when he was at his lowest point—namely, in his passion and his death on the cross. And his death was only the beginning of a longer story, for after his death he was resurrected to new life and later ascended into heaven.
Children are dependent and reliant on adults to meet their needs, to train them in the way to live, and to guide them as they begin to explore and learn about the world around them. Yet they are also genuinely open to God and other people, and they have a sincere desire to help others. By teaching his disciples to emulate children, Jesus is calling us to develop humility, patience, love, and genuine reliance on God to meet our needs.
Today is the last day in ordinary time before the beginning of Lent. We are about to begin our Lenten journey. Lent is a time to learn to give up some of our reliance on ourselves and the world and to learn to depend more and more on God. I pray today that I may learn how to rely on God for help in my journey of faith and to become aware in new ways of how I can serve God and others in my daily life.
- Joel Schickel