People were bringingJesus children so he could hug them. The students rebuked them. Seeingthis , irritated, Jesus told them,“Allow the children to come to me! Don’t stop them. God’s Kingdom is He took them in his arms, put his hands on them, and blessed them.people like them. Amen, I swear to you: If anyone won’t receive God’s Kingdom like a child, they’ll never enter it.”
Jesus loved kids. He was a teacher, after all: He worked with them. True, in his culture they were considered adults, but we call them teenagers. If you thought Jesus’s disciples were the same age as he was, the movies and art have been giving you the wrong idea. People in their thirties and forties didn’t quit their jobs to follow traveling rabbis. People in their teens and early twenties did. It’s why he called them children, and referred to them as “this generation.” It’s why they acted like children, or immature young people, so often.
This is one example of their immaturity. People brought Jesus their kids so he could bless them. As parents do. They want their children to grow up and do well and have every advantage, and of course having a prophet bless them, and maybe tell them a bit of God’s will for their lives, is a great advantage. And Jesus was glad to do it.
But the demands on Jesus’s time were huge. So his students took it upon themselves to drive away anyone whom they considered low priority. But as we’ve seen elsewhere, they didn’t have a correct sense about the Kingdom’s priorities. To Jesus, and to parents, children are priorities. To teenagers, they’re decidedly not.
Again, many commentators assume children, in Jesus’s day, were seen and not heard; that the Jews didn’t consider them valuable, and Jesus’s students were only expressing the sentiments of the larger culture. Wrong. Jesus’s students were expressing the sentiments of youth culture, where the younger you are, the less relevant you are. Teenagers don’t care to make time for children. They also don’t see why adults and parents make such a fuss over them. They don’t think of them as the next generation; they think of themselves as the next generation, and with few exceptions, are only interested in themselves. Jesus’s students thought of themselves as the soon-to-be masters of God’s Kingdom, because they followed the Messiah. And they would be—but they still had a lot of growing up to do, and still had a lot to learn about how the Kingdom works.
So Jesus used this as a teaching moment. The Kingdom, he said, is people like the children.
Be like children?
Frequently people misinterpret Jesus’s statement. They figure if we’re gonna enter the Kingdom, we gotta be like children. What’s that mean? They figure one of two things: We gotta be innocent as children, or we gotta be simple as children.
The “innocent as children” idea is really popular among people who don’t have children, don’t work with children, and don’t know any children. While there are plenty of well-behaved children, they are hardly innocent. Children will lie, cheat, steal, and be as manipulative as any adult, if it means they can get their way. They’re just as much sinners as adults are. Now, if by innocent you mean ignorant, well, that’s quite common: When people talk about their childhood, and “the time I lost my innocence,” what they mean is the time they discovered a real-world fact which adults take for granted: Their playtime isn’t infinite, their parents aren’t infallible, or there is no Easter Bunny. For whatever reason, people mix up this sort of childhood innocence with child sinlessess, which doesn’t exist: Children sin. A lot. Even the good kids.
The “simple as children” idea is, again, really popular among people who don’t know children. Children are aware of far more than adults realize. The only reason adults assume they don’t know any better, is because children don’t know how to articulate what they know. They can’t put it into words. They haven’t yet learned how. Neither are they sure yet how they feel about things. So “simple” is not a proper word we can use to describe children. And if Jesus wanted us to be simple in this way, why would he spend so much time teaching us difficult, abstract concepts in the first place—namely, the abstract concept of the Kingdom?
Children don’t understand the principles of the Kingdom because the Kingdom is as simple as they are. Nor because they’re less skeptical or cynical than adults. Jesus wasn’t talking about their intellect. The only differences between a child’s intellect, and an adult’s, are how much knowledge they have, and how much self-control they practice. Otherwise, a child can learn anything an adult can. And faster.
So what did Jesus mean by comparing children to the citizens of the Kingdom? It’s all in that word déxitai/“recieve.”
Receive the Kingdom.
When we see the word “receive” in the gospels, it’s nearly always in the context of receiving the good news of the Kingdom, and receiving the messengers of the good news of the Kingdom.
Whoever won’t receive you, nor hear your message: As you go outside that house or town, shake the dust off your feet. —Jesus, Matthew 10.14 KWL
Those who receive you, receive me.
Those who receive me, receive the One who sent me. —Jesus, Matthew 10.40 KWL
But [the people of Samaria] didn’t receive him, because his presence was going to Jerusalem.
[The shrewd steward:]
“I know what I should do so, once I’m fired from management, […]people might receive me in their houses.”
I tell you, make friends for yourselves out of unrighteous Mammon: When it fails you , they might receive you into Eternal tents.—Jesus, Luke 16.4 KWL
The general sense we get from the word is receptivity. How receptive are we to the Kingdom? How far are we willing to let it into our lives?
Kids: No problem. When you inform a child of a new idea, or a new truth, they’ll let it change their whole world. To be fair, kids allow way too many things to change their whole world: Give them a new toy and their lives will revolve around it; take it away and their lives are over, even though they’ve only had the toy a day. It takes children a long time to realize these things are not as earth-shattering as they think; even teenagers have trouble believing adults when we tell them, “It gets better,” for they’ve convinced themselves it certainly will not. But, taken in a positive direction—which was Jesus’s point—children embrace the Kingdom like the world-transforming event it is.
Adults, who are often too cynical for our own good, don’t always. Some of us react the very same way children do. Others of us are a lot more blasé: We’re pleased, but come on, you don’t expect us to jump on the furniture, do you? But we should. The Kingdom is awesome. Try living in it sometime.
We have to receive the Kingdom like children do. For if we can’t, we’re not gonna inherit it. Not now, not ever. And we see far too many Christians who treat the Kingdom as a future event, not a present-day one. They don’t follow the Sermon on the Mount, for they figure it only applies to the future, not the present. They don’t tap into the Holy Spirit’s power, for they figure it’s not for now, but later. They don’t try to communicate with Jesus, for they figure “I’ll learn everything I need to know after I die, and see Jesus face to face.” They don’t try to stop sinning, either: They keep their favorite sins, their favorite things, and cling to this world with both hands. Yet they actually think they’re gonna inherit the Kingdom… despite no preparation for it whatsoever.
Jesus loved kids because they accepted him. They might’ve had unrealistic expectations, or might have wanted something out of him. (We all approach God that way, kids included.) But regardless of their expectations, or their disappointments, they accepted him. Adults don’t always do that. If it turns out someone isn’t who we expected, we’ll reject them with outrage and revulsion. It’s like when you accidentally hug the wrong person: We freak out. And sometimes kids freak out. But more often, they just keep hugging—’cause they’re kids, and a hug is a hug.
Well, the Kingdom is the Kingdom. It won’t be as any of us expect. It’ll be better. So receive it, like a child.