One Child

“Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but the One who sent me.” 

Mark 9:36

Sometimes Jesus says such cryptic things and I wonder if I’ll ever be able to “unpack” it even if I spend my whole life pondering it. Of course it’s easy to receive a little child! Yesterday I was at a Lord’s Day celebration and there were cute little children playing around me. Three little girls in their nice dresses were playing house under the table with the long tablecloth covering them up. Three little boys were happily sliding around the floor in front of me while the program was going on. Even the celebrant mentioned that instead of listening to him on stage, we may prefer to look at the antics of the kids! Because children are easy to receive, to hug, to kiss, to cuddle! So what could Jesus possibly mean? 

Robert Seiple, the President of World Vision in 1992, wrote in a letter, “One of our sponsored children, a 14 year old Palestinian boy living on the West Bank, was caught by 16 Israeli soldiers as he was writing graffiti on a wall. The soldiers placed him up against the wall, and one shot him four times in the eye. As he lay on the ground, still alive, he was savagely beaten for almost an hour. During that time he was forced to stick his finger into his wound and wipe out the graffiti with his own blood. He was then bound and dragged through the village streets; finally thrown into the back of a jeep, and rudely dumped at a local hospital. Miraculously, he lived. Tragically this incident is not atypical. The entire drama was witnessed by an American. It has since been recorded in Western journals.”

This is just one horrible story among the millions of stories of children whose lives have been maimed by poverty, violence, abuse, and neglect. We do not need to look far. According to a 2016 study of the Council for the Welfare of Children and the  United Nations Children’s Fund, 8 in 10 Filipino children suffer from a form of violence. 

I believe that Jesus is saying that children are among the most unprotected, the most without a voice, the most “unseen” members of society. They can easily become victims, especially during war, natural calamities, or when parents are quarrelling, working too hard, or are OFWs in far away places. In the verses before verse 36, Jesus was instructing the disciples on how to be great. The logic of God is always different from the world’s, usually diametrically opposed even. If anyone of us wants to be great, we have to be a servant of those who are unprotected, those who have no voice, and those who are “unseen” by society. 

Lord, Your Words are hard to take. It is as if we have to carry the whole world on our shoulders! Help us to do the work You want us to do, to be Your heart, Your hands, Your feet. I know that it can never be enough, but if many of us take just one portion of the ache of the world for You, it can change the world!