Don't Send the Children Away

Jesus was still on the long road to Jerusalem, and in every village along the way, people came out to find him.

One afternoon most of the people who came were mothers and fathers, and they had brought their children. There were babies on hips and toddlers riding on shoulders, and bigger boys and girls running ahead and being called back. (In those days a family might carry a child to a great teacher to be blessed, the way some families now ask a grandmother to pray over a new baby.)

"Will he touch them?" one mother whispered. "If he would only put his hands on their heads and pray for them."

But the disciples had planted themselves in front of Jesus like guards at a palace gate.

"No, no, no," said one of them, flapping his hands as if he were shooing hens. "The Teacher is busy."

"Take them home," said another. "He has grown-up work to do today."

A baby began to wail. A girl hid her face in her father's robe. One by one, the parents started to turn around.

(The disciples should have known better. Not long before, they had argued all the way down a road about which of them was the greatest. Jesus had stood a child in the middle of them and said, "Whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me." Apparently it had not stuck.)

Then Jesus saw what was happening, and he was angry with his friends.

"Let the little children come to me!" he said. "Don't stop them! The kingdom of God belongs to people like these."

The disciples stared at the children. A child could not give money to the poor or study the Law or preach to a crowd. Most of them could not even stay clean until lunchtime. What could they possibly bring to God?

Jesus looked at his friends. "Truly I tell you," he said, "anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it."

Think about how a baby gets across a muddy road. It cannot walk around the puddles. It cannot pay anybody to help. Somebody who loves it just scoops it up and carries it over.

So the parents turned back, and the children came. One father lifted his boy right over the disciples' heads. "Here he is, Teacher!" Jesus took the children in his arms. He put his hands on their heads, one after another, and blessed them. Probably at least one of them grabbed a fistful of his beard. (Babies do that, even to the Son of God.) He did not hurry. The disciples stood by and watched, and their grown-up work could wait.

They had it the wrong way round. They thought people got close to God by being big and important and busy. Jesus showed them how people really come to him: the way those children did, empty-handed and carried. Not one of those children earned a blessing that afternoon. Jesus gave it to them anyway, one small head at a time.

The road to Jerusalem was still long, and Jesus knew a cross was waiting at the end of it. He kept walking anyway. All along the way people kept coming to him: a blind beggar shouting by the roadside, a cheating tax collector up a tree. Each time, somebody tried to hush them or grumbled that they did not belong near him.

Jesus welcomed every one. He was going to Jerusalem to die, and the people he was dying for looked a great deal like the ones his friends kept trying to turn away. "Whoever comes to me," he told a crowd once, "I will never send away." He meant it about the children on the road that afternoon, and about everyone who has come to him since.