This Sunday I’m preaching about Mark 9:33—10:16. This section feels disjointed: “The first shall be last,” letting strangers cast out demons in Jesus’ name, cut off your limbs to avoid a fiery, wormy hell, divorce. It’s all bookended by Jesus’ insistence that little children will lead the way to the kingdom of God.
To me, each of these snippets is illuminated by the image Jesus quite consciously creates: he literally draws small children from well outside the circle of discussion into the privileged center with him. In his way of turning a paradigm inside-out and upside down mid-argument, he cedes the place of teacher and leader to the ones everyone has forgotten, ignored, and disrespected.
This passage is asking more of us than to make theoretical statements about what children are like. Jesus doesn’t just use the child as an object lesson. He connects with them—and he praises anyone who would “welcome a child” as welcoming him, as welcoming God. As the cutting-off-limbs tangent implies, we ignore Jesus’ love for children at our own peril.
It’s all very well to say that “no one cared about children back then,” but most of us don’t have a very clear-eyed view of children’s place in our own society.
The evangelist’s decision to have Jesus welcoming children at the beginning and end of this passage reminded me of Black feminist scholar bell hooks’ classic All About Love. It is ultimately a sprawling book—it addresses feminism and men, romantic love, self-love, love in families and communities, and love and justice in all of society. But it begins with an examination of how we teach love to children:
Every day thousands of children in our culture are verbally and physically abused…They remain the property of parenting adults to do with as they will.
bell hooks, “Justice: Childhood Love Lessons,” All About Love. (emphasis mine)
There can be no love without justice. Until we live in a culture that not only respects but also upholds basic civil rights for children, most children will not know love. In our culture the private family dwelling is the one institutionalized sphere that can easily be autocratic and fascistic. As absolute rulers, parents can usually decide without any intervention what is best for their children. If children’s rights are taken away in any domestic household, they have no legal recourse.
I think it is tempting, in the interest of understanding or making kind assumptions, to view the recent emphasis on “Parents First” as merely misguided. But I find it chilling, and I think it’s calculated on the part of certain scary people, to invoke children’s needs while erasing children.
It’s not only deeply anti-child; it’s reasserting a fascist logic of ownership and control over other human beings. It’s a deft move to normalize the same worldview allowing neighbors or distant relatives ownership over a grown woman’s pregnant body; allowing trans bodies to be pathologized; allowing refugee bodies to be imprisoned and abused in violation of international law.
Jesus is not asking us merely to protect children from the world, but to reshape the world into a safe and honoring place for them.
Love is as love does, and it is our responsibility to give children love. When we love children we acknowledge by our every action that they are not property, that they have rights—that we respect and uphold their rights.
Without justice there can be no love.
bell hooks, “Justice: Childhood Love Lessons,” All About Love.
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