Come as a child

The poem called ‘Song of Childhood’ by Peter Handke which features in the film Wings of Desire captures, for me, something of the openness of childhood when the world lies open before us and we encounter it without cynicism or prior knowledge. The big questions of life are in front of us but we have yet found answers or the pretence that we can know all the answers.

In the poem the child has retained that openness to life and existence as she or he has grown but in our gospel reading (Matthew 11. 16-19, 25-30) today we hear of people who have not. The cynics that Jesus speaks about in verse 16-19 have seen it all before and are critical of people whether they abstain or whether they partake, whether they mourn or whether they party. Nothing is right for these cynics and therefore they cannot receive anything from anyone.

Then Jesus speaks about the wise and the learned, those who think they have the knowledge of what God wants. They cannot receive what God wants to give because they already think that they know it all. Both groups are closed off to what God wants to share, one group because everything is dismissed, the other because everything is known.

Jesus says that those able to receive are the unlearned or children. They are not worldly wise or information wise and, as a result, they are open to what is new and what is revealed. This is how we need to be if we are to receive what God has revealed to us in Jesus.

Tom Wright says this:

“Jesus had come to know his father the way a son does: not by studying books about him, but by living in his presence, listening for his voice, and learning from him as an apprentice does from a master, by watching and imitating. And he was now discovering that the wise and learned were getting nowhere, and that the ‘little people’ – the poor, the sinners, the tax collectors, ordinary folk – were discovering more of God, simply by following him, Jesus, than the learned specialists who declared that what he was doing didn’t fit with their complicated theories.”

Unless you come,
come as a child,
not grasping but trusting,
not arrogantly but humbly,
not resisting but accepting,
not feebly but vigorously,
not giving but receiving,
not self-centred but God-centred,
not teaching but feeding,
not gaining life but losing life,
not leaving but returning,
not closed, but open.

Unless you come,
come as a child,
you cannot enter
the kingdom of God.

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U2 - Stay (Faraway, So Close!).