Readings: Ezekiel 18:1-10, 13, 30-32; Psalm 50; Matthew 19:13-15
The
English Catholic writer G.K.Chesterton is supposed to have said that
the purpose of life is ‘to get from first childhood to second childhood
without being too damaged by the intervening adult stage’. Telling this
to one of the Irish friars he replied that the problem was that some of
the brethren went from first childhood to second childhood without any
intervening adult stage!
The theme of spiritual
childhood runs through the New Testament and the readings today invite
us to think about it. The Ezekiel reading is about being adult: no
longer will we blame others for our sins but each person will accept
responsibility for whatever they do. That seems fine: we must be grown
up and not blame others. I cannot say my teeth are on edge because my
grandfather ate sour grapes. There is great dignity in acknowledging
what we have done even when it has been mistaken or wrong: to say ‘I did
it, I’m sorry’, or ‘I misunderstood but I accept responsibility’:
whatever way we put it there is a nobility and a maturity in accepting
responsibility in that way.
Jesus is not going back on
that. He is not suggesting that we become childish again but rather that
we be childlike for it is to such that the kingdom of heaven belongs.
It cannot mean that we must never grow up but rather that when we do we
become adults who have not lost the capacity for what makes childhood
wonderful: the sense of wonder itself, of freedom and spontaneity, of
openness to new things, a readiness for surprises, and so on. The adult
who has not forgotten how to be a child is an attractive figure. We
probably know people who have become a bit too adult, in whom wonder and
spontaneity have been lost, as a result of difficulties they have
encountered, but it is always sad to see it.
There is a
human and psychological wisdom in saying that the adult must remain
childlike and try to retain the blessings that go with that stage of
human development. It means integrating childhood within our maturing
rather than leaving it behind. But there is also a theological
foundation for this. Jesus is the ‘child’ of God. In early Christian
texts we get this description of him, as the ‘child’ of the Father. We
are then ‘children in the Child’ as St Paul says, made to be members of
the family of God, so that we too can call God ‘Abba’. This is ‘Daddy’,
the child’s name for her father, and we become entitled to use it of God
because we live now from the Spirit of the Father and the Child, Jesus.
Let
me finish with another Chesterton quote. Etienne Gilson, a great
historian of medieval philosophy, said that Chesterton had understood
Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy better than anybody else in the 20th
century. And Chesterton had the gift of presenting that philosophy in
perfectly simple and yet profound ways. Here for example is an argument
for the existence of God that will appeal to the child in us. ‘If you
see one elephant you will say ‘how extraordinary’. If you see a second
elephant you will say ‘what a coincidence’. If you see a third elephant
you will begin to suspect a plot.’
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