Friends, why was the story of Jesus with the little children, versions of which appear in the three synoptic Gospels, so vividly remembered by the first Christians? I think they intuited that it got very close to the heart of Jesus’ teaching. The way Mark sets up his account of this story in our Gospel for this weekend is frankly funny, and it’s an example of the disciples completely missing the point of everything.
Watch The Ladder Doesn’t Matter - Bishop Barron's Sunday Sermon Here
GOSPEL
Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Mark 9:30–37
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus presents a child as the model for his disciples who want to be the most important. Jesus lays out for his disciples what is going to happen to him in Jerusalem, how he will be rejected, tortured, and killed. Oblivious to this, the disciples are discussing who among them is the most important. For Jesus, the path to greatness lies on the road to Calvary, to self-forgetting love; for the disciples—and for most people of most ages—it lies along the road to ego inflation.
What is the antidote? A child is proposed as a kind of living icon to these ambitious Apostles. We notice first how Jesus physically identifies with the child, sitting down at his level and placing his arms around him. It is as though he is saying that he himself is like a child. How so? Children don’t know how to dissemble, how to be one way and act another. They are what they are; they act in accordance with their deepest nature.
Why was this story of Jesus’ identification with children preserved by all of the synoptic Gospels? Somehow it gets close to the heart of Jesus’ life and message.