He Took Them in His Arms

Mark tells this story in four verses. Parents bring children to Jesus. The disciples turn them away. Jesus is indignant, corrects the disciples, teaches a sentence about the kingdom, and then takes the children in his arms, puts his hands on them and blesses them.

Much attention goes to the teaching, and it deserves it. But look at the last verse, because it shows how the teaching is meant to be lived. Jesus does not say a kind word about children and move on. He takes them in his arms. He touches them. He blesses them, one at a time, in a crowd of people who would have preferred he get back to the important business.

The disciples were not cruel. They were managing access to a busy teacher, and small children with no questions to ask and no influence to offer seemed like a poor use of his time. Their instinct is one every busy adult recognizes. There is real work to do, and here is an interruption.

Jesus' indignation is rare in Mark. He is not mildly disappointed. He is angry, because the disciples have taken a picture of the kingdom and treated it as a distraction from the kingdom. That is the one idea. The people we are tempted to move past in order to get to what matters are often the very place where what matters is happening.

Consider the turn toward life. There is a child, or an elderly parent, or someone in your circle who asks nothing important and needs attention anyway. You have a day full of things that seem to count more. The passage does not tell you to abandon your work. It tells you to see the interruption differently. Jesus stopped, and stooped, and put his hands on children who could not follow a sermon, and Mark calls it a blessing.

Receiving the kingdom like a child means being small enough to take what is given. Living the kingdom like Jesus means being unhurried enough to give it to the small.