Today’s Gospel reading (
Luke 22.24-30) is one of those passages where Jesus turns conventional thinking on its head by telling his disciples that “the greatest among you must become like the youngest and the leader like one who serves.” Jesus turns the meaning of greatness and leadership upside down. No longer are they to be understood in terms of garnering wealth and power for oneself. Now they are understood to be about service; giving your life that others might live. Jesus, as the servant King, says to us, ‘I, your Lord and Teacher, have just washed your feet. You, then, should wash one another’s feet. I have set an example for you, so that you will do just what I have done for you.’
The most radical reversal in a culture where the elders were revered is that “the greatest among you must become like the youngest.” Years before, the prophet Isaiah had promised a child born for us who would establish endless peace upheld with justice and righteousness. Isaiah described a time when the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard would lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, with a little child leading them (
Isaiah 11.1-9).
Isaiah's vision of the peaceable kingdom was centred on a child born to be the Prince of Peace. When that promised child came among us at Jesus, he said: ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs’; ‘Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’; ‘Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven’ and ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.’
The child born for us leads us to become like children. Why is this so? Children see the peaceable kingdom, until adults teach them otherwise. That is why the children are our future and can lead the way into a better future. We need to unlearn the dirty devices of this world in order to become, as it were, a little child again that we may enter into the Kingdom of God.
Nicola Ravenscroft, the creator of the mudcub sculptures that we have at St Andrew’s this autumn, intuitively understands these truths and, as a maternal sculptor, creates children that through their connection to nature grant us a vision of the peaceable kingdom toward which they wish to lead us. Her mudcub sculptures, simply dressed in soft silk tulle, hesitate in time, leaning forward, hopeful, poised to dive, eyes closed, dreaming into their future, anticipating things unseen.
Nicola writes that “as an artist, I am visionary, sculptor, mother to many, and grandmother to even more.” She adds that she breathes life into life taking “clay, dirt and stardust, shaped and twisted torn smoothed and broken lost, found and moulded wax and singing molten bronze through white-hot crucible-refining fire, Earth’s own core breathing life into revealing-truth, a giving-birth to energy.” The result is this collection of mudcubs – children intimately connected to the earth – reminding us of our duty of care to life, to love, to planet earth.
She says they are, are “earth’s messenger-angels: silently calling us all to live in peace with nature”: “Earth’s children are life’s heartbeat: they are her hope, her future ... they are breath of Earth herself. Creative, inquisitive and trusting, children are Earth’s possibility thinkers. They seek out, and flourish in fellowship, in ‘oneness’, and being naturally open-hearted, and wide-eyed hungry for mystery, delight and wonder, they embrace diversity with the dignity of difference.”
These are the children we are called to welcome, the children we are to become, the children to whom the peaceable kingdom belongs. They stand together, peacefully, as friends, vulnerable and strong, silently singing out their call to change. These little children lead with trusting feet, plump and bare. The Prince of Peace is with them and calls us to let them lead the way.
As we contemplate these children this autumn, may we be led by Jesus to become like little children ourselves.
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