I discovered the TV series, “The West Wing”, on Netflix a few years ago. For those of you who may not know the show, it takes place in the White House with Martin Sheen playing the part of the President. He is surrounded by numerous staff members all with their own set of talents and weaknesses. It was such a fascinating program I got through all 7 seasons within a few months.
Towards the end of the series, the actor Jimmy Smits (Matt Santos) came on board as a candidate for President as Martin Sheen’s character was stepping down. One of the original characters, Josh Lyman, took over as candidate Santos’ campaign manager. Josh knew technically all the aspects of running a campaign and he sweated day and night to be sure Santos followed each detail to the letter. No one was going to outsmart him in this election!
The problem was that all of this managing and handling squashed who Santos was as a person…at his core, and all people initially saw was this robot saying all the “right things”. Eventually, Santos broke away from this intellectual prison and began speaking from his heart, from his soul, using the inner strength he had all along. In the end, he wins the election against all odds.
In today’s reading from Mark, we see parents trying to get Jesus to bless their children. The disciples, however, have assumed the role of Jesus’ managers, his handlers. He had grown so popular they felt that they needed to govern how he interacted with the people around him. You could almost imagine the paparazzi around him with flash bulbs going off and the disciples hustling Jesus on to the next gig.
But Jesus stops them and says to, “let the children come to me”. He tells his followers that it is having the attitude of children that will get us to heaven. Being childlike….not childish…but childlike. What does that mean?
I was at a bible study a couple years ago that was being led by a Rabbi that my wife and I knew well. I believe he was discussing the story of Jonah. During the discussion he related how he had been talking with an evangelical Christian professor at the local college about what aspects of each of their faiths did they feel was mostly a made up story. The Rabbi said it was Purim, the tale of how the Jewish girl named Esther became Queen and convinced the king not to destroy the Jewish people. The professor countered that she felt the Resurrection…yup the Resurrection…was just a tale of our faith and not necessarily true!!
Don’t we experience this all the time, maybe even in ourselves. How we try to be clever with our faith. To be on the “cutting edge” so we can appear popular with those around us. The intellectual comes out. We, in a sense, manage our belief in God, rather than letting the spirit that God gave us in His image, take over and guide our hearts.
To be childlike is to look to the adults around us, especially our parents, for counsel and comfort. And I think this is what Jesus means when He says that only those who are like children will enter the Kingdom. When we look to God as children would look to their Father for guidance for everything we face in our lives.
Sirach tells us that God gave us the graces of the spirit (wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord) so that we can better know Him. But Sirach makes it even more simple. He tells us to just AVOID EVIL. We do not need a PhD in Theology to know in our hearts, as would children, how to just avoid evil.
It doesn’t take a scholar to know that killing an infant as it emerges from the birth canal is evil. It doesn’t take a college education to know that you don’t abuse children or use your position of authority to corrupt seminarians. You don’t need to finish high school to know that you don’t lie about being attacked in a hate crime. And you do not even need to graduate from kindergarten to know that we are made to love, just as God is love. See? Simple.
