Those of you who’ve tripped up one of these little ones who trust in me : It’d be good if, instead, you’d strapped a donkey wheel to their neck… and thrown them in the sea.—Jesus, Mark 9.42 KWL
No, Jesus isn’t recommending we drown children. This is hyperbole, an exaggerated statement meant to get your attention. He does this sometimes, you know. There are folks who claim we need to always interpret the bible literally, and even they catch how Jesus didn’t literally mean this. (Although there are exceptions. But they’re nuts.)
Sin, as Jesus points out many times, is greatly to be avoided. Death is better than sin. We don’t think that way—we love our lives too much, and figure if it’s a choice between sin and death, we’ll pick sin. (Heck, if it’s a choice between sin and boredom, we’ll pick sin.) We’re sinners; we don’t see it as the big deal God does. We miss the fact that sin causes death. Jesus’s point, in saying things like this, is it’d be far better to skip the sin and just die: At least we won’t have sinned.
Or, in this case, trip up the little ones who follow him. A moment ago, Jesus called forth a servant boy to make a point about servants in the Kingdom. Now he was making another point about children in his Kingdom: If we’re gonna have youngsters among us, we dare not skandalísi/“trip up” such people.
We get our word “scandal” from the Greek word, but it stopped being an exact match in the Middle Ages: “Trip up” or “make stumble” is much better. A skándalon was a thing in the street you’d trip over, and metaphorically it meant something which gets people to sin. What might make kids sin? If you know kids, all sorts of things can provoke sin. Make ’em angry, or frustrated, or irritated, and because they lack self-control, they’ll instinctively lash out—and sin.
Passing down hypocrisy.
Christian teachers train our kids to sin in all sorts of ways. Mostly it’s by lying about our own sin. In other words, hypocrisy.
We sin—then cover it up. Or justify our behavior. Or lie about it. We won’t repent; we especially won’t apologize, and reveal ourselves to be weak. We fear it’ll lose the kids’ respect. I’ve actually been told, by other teachers, to never apologize to my kids—which I did anyway, which I suppose explains why I was their favorite teacher. (My authority, as I pointed out to the kids regularly, came not by being better than them, but from knowing more than they did.) This fear of losing respect though weakness, is how animals work. It’s how sin works. It’s not how God works. Jesus gained the world through his weakness, and Paul rightly noted, “When I’m weak, I’m strong” —for God regularly uses the weak to defeat the strong.
When we use a sin-based system for our authority—i.e. “might makes right”—of course you’re gonna lose kids’ respect. You’ve unwittingly taught them those values; and once they discover what a hypocrite you are, and how you’ve lied to them their whole lives, you’ve lost them. That’s a lot of betrayal to undo. And once found out in this way, most adults botch the opportunity to correct things by—you guessed it—justifying their behavior.
Here’s the thing. Humans aren’t anywhere as good at hiding our sins as we think. To learn to be adults, kids mimic their parents’ behavior. When their parents sin, the kids inevitably wind up mimicking not normal behavior, but concealed sin behavior. And once they stumble into the concealed sin—and they will—they’ll sin the very same way. This is how certain sins turn into what Christians call “generational curses”: Bad Christian behavior, disguised as proper Christian behavior, is passed down. It all begins with Christian teachers and parents who just won’t be authentic when they try to teach children.
I once had an angry Christian pastor. Naturally, he raised his kids to be angry Christians, and in so doing, multiplied his own sin. (To be fair, he himself might’ve been raised by angry Christians, and didn’t know better.) Like attracts like, so he had a church full of angry Christians, all likewise raising angry Christian kids. And thus Christendom is plagued with such things.
Passing down legalism.
The other way Christians trip up our trainees is by being excessively legalistic: We get rid of grace, and pile on the rules. Often we’ll do both at the same time: We’ll be hypocritical legalists.
Among legalists, every rule must be followed, and violating any rule has a harsh consequence. Kids can’t possibly follow all the rules. So they crack. And they’ll quit. Nearly every Wiccan I’ve ever met was raised by legalistic Christians—and they’re never going back, because Wicca has no bosses, so nobody can tell them what to do anymore.
Yeah, when you’re a new Christian, there need to be some rules. You are, after all, trying to break the sin-patterns in your life. But grace must never be absent, or hard to find. When it is, people just assume it’s not there—because in the rest of the world, it’s not there either. If anything, we need to overdo grace for just this reason—if overdoing grace is even possible. God is far more gracious than any human, and if he’s our standard, and he’s not overdoing it, we could stand to be far more gracious than we are.
The donkey wheel.
Now, Jesus could’ve picked from a lot of different violent images to describe how people may as well do away with their mistaught kids. Why “strap a donkey wheel to their neck… and throw them in the sea”?
Well, the donkey wheel is an apt metaphor for legalism. The mýlos onikós/“donkey mill” was the way the ancients ground their flour: You take a heavy stone wheel, put wheat berries under it, and grind the berries to powder. The bigger the stone, the less practical it becomes for humans to turn it, so that’s where teams of donkeys come in. (As you can guess, a donkey wheel is a huge stone—yet too many bibles just translate this as “millstone,” which can be any size.) You harness the donkeys to the wheel, and make them walk round it. It’s long, boring, tedious work. The donkeys can’t just stop, for the other donkeys will drag them forward. And if the donkeys try to run off… well, their straps keep them attached to the wheel, and they’ll turn it all the faster.
So first Jesus says we may as well strap the kids to this wheel: They’ll work hard, go nowhere, and none of that work is really for their benefit. Having taught at Christian schools, let me tell you: Few of the rules are really for the kids’ benefit. Most are for the teachers’ convenience. Yeah, kids need structure, but structure comes from having a dependable, fair-minded adult around, not from a ton of rules. Without fair-minded adults—as demonstrated by every government but Jesus’s—the rules don’t matter much. They’re just a harness round the neck, turning a wheel. A heavy burden.
But then Jesus took the leap from turning that wheel, to tossing that wheel into the sea. More than likely someone else had compared legalism to turning a donkey wheel—it’s so appropriate—and Jesus just borrowed that saying… then added his own little twist to the ending, just so we can see how totally futile and stupid it is.
Don’t drown your kids in legalism! It’s a common temptation to all parents, ’cause a lot of legalistic, misbegotten Christians teach that this is the way you raise good Christian kids: Lots of rules, lots of structure, strictly followed. Baloney: I’ve had to teach those kids, and they’re not good. They’re little hypocrites, just like their parents. And once they grow up and move out, more than half of them quit Jesus and go pagan.
Yeah, you want to raise kids to be good citizens and good Christians. Yeah, you want to train them up the way they should go. But you have to resist that temptation to force them into your mold, rather than let the Holy Spirit shape them into his creations. You have to remember you’re following his lead, not the other way around—you’re teaching your kids to follow him, not you. So in training up God’s children, do it in God’s love, with God’s grace, encouraging the Spirit’s fruit, and while being an honest, transparent example of God’s grace in your life.