Babes in the Woods

October 8, 2006
Text: Mark 10:2-16
Preacher: Pastor Stein

The Pharisees were wise in the ways of the world. They knew what’s what. They weren’t babes in the woods. They had been around. They weren’t born yesterday.

So when they asked Jesus this question about divorce, they already knew the answer. They were not trying to get new information. They were trying to trip Jesus up. To catch him in making a political mistake. Maybe he’d say something stupid that would get him into trouble with the authorities. The authority in this case being King Herod, the guy who earlier had had John the Baptist’s head served on a platter because John had criticized Herod’s own peculiar marriage arrangements. Maybe the Pharisees could get Jesus into trouble. For they knew how things worked in the world.

Against the worldly wisdom of the Pharisees Jesus sets before us the little children. This is not the first time in the Gospel of Mark that Jesus has used children as an example to the disciples. Earlier (as we heard a few weeks ago here) he told them that they had to welcome even children, a radical statement in days when children were like property and not yet persons. They, the disciples (and us, of course), were being told: welcome even outcasts. It is a little different in today’s reading. Today, instead of telling them they should be nice to children, Jesus tells them they should be as children. Be like children. If anyone wants to enter the kingdom of God, Jesus says, he or she must receive it as a little child.

This is kind of a riddle. And the riddle goes like this: how is a child not like a Pharisee? We modern types might answer from a sentimental and romanticized picture of children. Children are portrayed as sweet and innocent, powerless and pliable, not mean or greedy,. Painted in pastels, so to speak. But as parents know, that is often as not wishful thinking. And that certainly was not the view people had of children when Jesus spoke these words to the disciples.

But one thing we can say about children and Pharisees is this: Pharisees are old and children are new. Pharisees are experienced and children are without experience.

Being new, children have three things that Pharisees seem to have lost.

First, being new, children have no past. (For a little while, anyway.) No past means no regrets. It also means no grudges, no revenge, no payback. No unrequited loves, no disrepute, no careers made or broken.

Second, being new, children live in wide adventure. I’m not sure it feels like an adventure to children, but all that we know was once unknown to us. Every fact was once a mystery, every conclusion once a question.

And third, being new, children seem to approach life with enthusiastic expectations. I don’t mean that children don’t know sorrow or think that everything is and will be great. I mean that their expectations of life are spirited and energetic and eager.

The rest of us, being old, know a little about life. We, like the Pharisees, are wise in the ways of the world. But our wisdom has not always come in pleasant packages. We have had too many experiences that, as they say, build character. Relationships do not always work out, futures do not always unfold as we hope they will. People we admired turn out to be jerks. People we depended on turn out to be untrustworthy. People have been mean, or stupid, or corrupt, or unfair, or just weak when we needed them to be strong. Our luck has been bad: the bus pulled away just as we arrived to catch it, the door closed, the opportunity snatched by another. Not that life is bleak, but that the path from there to here has had a few rocks on it, sometime pebbles, sometimes boulders.

The Pharisees come to Jesus with dumb questions and nasty motives. Who knows exactly what they were thinking? Maybe they were afraid that Jesus teachings would disrupt a way of life that they found comfortable. Or even found good and true and right. Or maybe they felt he was disrespecting their discipline and training. Or maybe someone whom they valued or depended on told them to. I don’t know. They were doing the kind of thing that people do based on their experience of the world and other people and their ideas about how things work and should work. But the Pharisees in this story don’t seem happy to me.

The promise of Christianity is new life. Another way to say this is a life healed. Another way to say this is a life restored. Another way to say this is a life saved. The aches and bruises that result from our stumbles on those rocky paths need no longer control us. Not that everybody and everything will treat us right, but that the wrongs will not be such overwhelming burdens.

When Jesus speaks about children and the kingdom of God, he is not making up rules and requirements. He is stating an observation. The promise of new life that he offers is relief and rest for those who hold so tight to those burdens. What we hope to find is a way for us to come to God and to life in exactly the way children are different from Pharisees. What we hope for in Jesus, what we pray for, what we trust he will do, is to enable us to be as new as children.

That our past will no longer control us. That, being as children, we may live without regret and not driven to revenge and retribution, or engulfed in guilt and clothed in shame, but that we may know that we are forgiven.

That we may no longer be indifferent, living withdrawn and insulated and isolated. That, being as children, we may see our lives ahead as an adventure, not being nonchalant but welcoming surprise.

And that we may no longer think ahead dispiritedly, anticipating disappointment and disillusionment. That, being as children, we may have enthusiastic expectations for this life and for a promised life to come.

Like the Pharisees, we know what’s what. We have been around. Yet we hope to be as ones born yesterday into a new life. We hope that as the children were by Jesus, we may be embraced by God and blessed.