Br. Jamie Nelson

Matthew 19:13-15

In this gospel passage, parents bring their young children to be blessed by Jesus.

Initially, the disciples try to shoo the children away. Perhaps the gatekeeping disciples want to protect their teacher’s time and energy for meetings with people they deem more important. Conversations like the ones that Jesus has with a group of religious thought leaders and with a wealthy prospective disciple, the two events which bookend this story in the text.

However, Jesus stops the disciples, saying, “Let the children come to me and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.”[1]

What does it mean when Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven belongs to young children and to the people like them?

Jesus is reminding his followers and us that the kingdom of heaven will look much different than the vision of it we can dream up with our earthly ideals of self-made success, pride, and accomplishment.

Children in Jesus’s culture had no political power or social status, thus making it easy for them to become invisible, ignored, and to be deemed insignificant by the disciples in this story. Yet they were welcomed and blessed by Jesus all the same. They didn’t earn Jesus’s attention or love, but he freely gave it anyway.

The children who Jesus welcomed and blessed were too young to contribute much productive labor towards earthly ideals of success and accomplishment. They were dependent on others to put food on the table and to keep a roof over their heads. Yet Jesus tells us that the kingdom of heaven belongs to them and to those like them.

Who are those like them? The children who Jesus welcomed and blessed were, in many ways, like another group of people in Jesus’s time and before, the people referred to in the Hebrew Bible as the anawim, meaning “meek,” “lowly,” or “humble.”[2]

They were people who because of poverty or marginalization, had little power themselves, and chose to put their trust and hope in God’s mercy and justice. They were people like today’s psalmist, who penned the first line of Psalm 16: “Protect me, O God, for in you I take refuge.” They were people like Jesus’s mother Mary, whose words of trust and hope in God we proclaim each night at Evening Prayer as we chant the Magnificat.

Who are the anawim in our world today? They might be from families displaced from their homes by fires, floods, war, or humanitarian disasters. They might be refugees and asylum seekers at our borders, or ordinary people caught up in political battles over immigration. They might be vulnerable or marginalized people of all sorts, overlooked by the powerful, yet powerfully loved by God.

Whoever they are, Jesus is clear: “Let the children come to me and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.”

So how to pray with this story? Here’s one suggestion:

One of the riches of the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer is the Baptismal Covenant, which includes five invitations for how Christians are called to live out our faith.[3] The liturgy includes these lines:

To which we respond, “yes, with God’s help.”

With God’s help, as you live out your baptismal vocation today, say yes to the vision of the kingdom of heaven Jesus proclaims here.

[1] Matthew 19:14

[2] ELCA Pastor Dan Erlander’s booklet Manna and Mercy (1992) introduced me to the concept of the anawim (עֲנָוִים):  http://danielerlander.com/manna.html

[3] https://www.episcopalchurch.org/what-we-believe/baptismal-covenant/