Mark 10:13-31 "Like a Child" Scott Hoezee

This morning's sermon provided an opportunity to hit one of the themes I have often nurtured in my preaching here: the creation. Now this evening, as we are coming to the end of our twelve-year journey together, it seems only fitting that we highlight that other constitutive theme of my preaching among you: the grace of God. In 1993, only a few weeks and months into my time in this pulpit, many of you voiced your appreciation for my constant highlighting of grace. One of my favorite passages that brings this theme out nicely is this one from Mark 10.

On a day when no less than six covenant children of this congregation were brought forward to the baptism font, it seems more than a little natural to hear Jesus' words, "Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such is the kingdom of God." Who among us has a hard time understanding those words? Who among us today has not smiled and found great joy in all these baptisms? We find children charming, adorable, wonderful. We hark back to our own childhoods with a sense of wistful longing, wishing at times we could be that carefree and innocent again.

Hence, we have a difficult time understanding why the disciples would ever have tried to shoo little kids away from Jesus. But that's because we forget how children were viewed throughout most of history. Indeed, you need not go back very far, even in our own circles, to arrive at a day when the rule was "Children are to be seen, not heard." Not so long ago the concept of a "Children's Sermon" would have been met with no small amount of skepticism Because tucked behind the "seen and not heard" mentality was a certain disdain for the messiness, the interruptive nature, of children. There is a reason why the wealthy used to send their kids away to boarding schools as soon as possible even as the nitty-gritty details of child-rearing were left in the hands of nannies and governesses.

Throughout much of history children were viewed as miniature adults who needed to have the child part beaten out of them so that they could, as soon as possible, join respectable society. Certainly in Jesus' day many viewed children as not quite fully human yet, as almost a kind of "loser" who existed in a stage of life that no sane adult would ever feel nostalgia for. To the grown-ups in Jesus' day, hearing someone wish he or she could be a little kid again would have sounded as odd as hearing a cured person say he wished he could go back to the days of having cancer again. Who would ever wish for such a thing!?

Surely Jesus could not be bothered with such urchins and hence the disciples' efforts to keep Jesus free of having to put up with their silly, immature ways. But as we all know, Jesus embraces and blesses these children. Again, however, given what we just reviewed in terms of a child's status back then, the picture of Jesus' laying his hands on those young brows and smiling into their cherubic little faces is not merely a vignette of how much Jesus loves little kids. Instead, Jesus was elevating all that was undesirable about children to say that just such an attitude, just such a second-class status, was somehow required to get into the kingdom of God. You get into the kingdom not by being cute, not on account of your saying the kind of adorable things Art Linkletter used to love, and not because babies are irresistible.

What Jesus was saying is that you get into the kingdom because the grace of God scoops you up into the divine embrace even though you did not earn it and cannot understand it. You get grace the way Isaac got it this evening and the way Lydia, Rhys, Katrina, Keira, and Annika got it this morning: it just comes to you out of a clear blue sky. It's free. It comes to you for free even before you understand the difference between something that's free and something that has a price.

So when Jesus suggests we all need to become like children, he means that we must, in utter humility, accept that the kingdom is not a reward for meritorious service and hard work. The kingdom is not for high achievers. Being in the kingdom is not like being up on the medal platform at the Olympics or being named "Person of the Year" by Time magazine or hearing Donald Trump say, "You're hired." Getting into the kingdom is a sheer gift, and the child-like part comes when you just accept that.

That's not easy, of course. To admit that Jesus did it all for you requires admitting at the same time that Jesus had to do it all because you were, to be blunt, a lost loser when left to your own devices. And every one of us knows why that shoe pinches. Every one of us knows what it is like to assess our standing in life by making downward comparisons with other people. The difference between me and the person on the news being led away in handcuffs is not the grace of God but the fact that I lead a better life to begin with. Period. God loves me not despite my woeful sin but because I am, morally speaking, really attractive. I've got a better moral and spiritual dossier than lots of other people I walk past in the mall or see carousing out on the streets late into the night. The gospel says God makes us good because he loves us. We keep wanting to say God loves us because we're so good on our own.

Jesus says, "Put all such thinking away. Just figure that you are as helpless, as clueless, as unable to do anything for God as the lowliest little child and then recognize that you get in anyway just because God is gracious." And long about the time we are ready to raise a bony finger into the air to say back to Jesus, "Yeah but . . ." along comes this rich young ruler fellow. So let's just let him speak for us, or at least he can speak for the little moralist who lives deep in most of our hearts.

"Good teacher, what good thing must I do to be a good enough person so as to inherit eternal life?" Curiously, Jesus begins his response by picking up on the adjective "good." "No one is really good except God, you know" Jesus says. That initial line seems disconnected from what follows and yet, in his own delightfully subtle way, Jesus has already begun to unravel this man's way of looking at life. He wants to know how he can be good enough to earn his ticket to heaven, and so Jesus says right off the bat, "You're not going to get far if you persist in having this hang-up about being 'good.'"

Still, Jesus then starts to reel off a list of commandments. But in so doing Jesus knew what we know: once you give someone a list, it soon begins to look like a checklist and that, in turn, soon becomes a tool by which to grade yourself on the curve. If you can keep your plusses ahead of your minuses, then all things considered you're doing great.

So at first blush, it looks as though Jesus is validating the idea that you can, on your own, work your way to heaven. And this young man plays right into Jesus' hand. "All these have I kept from my youth! What do I still lack!?" This man was lovely in his ardor and in his sincerity. Jesus couldn't help but love him. But Jesus loved him too much to let him persist in this wrong-headed conception of salvation. I don't doubt it hurt Jesus a little to say it, but he goes for the chink in this man's moral armor by telling him to sell all that he had. "There's just one box left to check on the list and once you can put a big red mark there, then come and follow me."

The man went away sad because, as Mark tells us, he had lots of possessions. But the truth is, every person who approaches salvation this way will, sooner or later, walk away sad. If attaining eternal life is about getting a perfect score on life's checklist of virtues, we all have at least that one box that we find all-but impossible to get checked off. This is not a problem peculiar to the rich. The poor would have their own unchecked boxes to contend with. They wouldn't have a hard time selling all that they have because they have nothing to start with but if a morally pristine scorecard is the way into the kingdom, even the poor would eventually be confronted with some box or another they couldn't quite get right when left to their own devices.

As I have suggested before, the main problem for the rich is not that they can't sell all that they have but rather that they tend to rely too much on themselves in the first place. Nowhere in the Bible is there a universal commandment that Christians may not have possessions. Indeed, a good deal of the law in the Old Testament has to do with property rights, nurturing respect for the goods of our neighbors, and other similar laws that tacitly grant the fact that even as believers in God, we will own things and have money in the bank. So if selling everything is not a requirement to being a disciple, why did Jesus tell his man to sell all he had?

Jesus did so in the hope that this man would come back to Jesus eventually to say, "I seem to be unable to save myself by my own efforts. Is there another way?" Yes, there is. It is the way of the little children Jesus had just been embracing. It is the way of recognizing we can't do it, admitting we are stuck, acknowledging that dependence on Christ alone is the only way. There's a whole lot of pride that needs to be swallowed to accept salvation by grace alone. But just that is the point of Mark 10.

When reading this passage last week, I was struck by the wonderful irony of the juxtaposition between verse 15 and verse 20. In verse 15 Jesus says you have to become like a little child to receive the kingdom. Then in verse 20 the young man says that ever since he was a child he had kept the law perfectly. Do you see the irony there? The young man is saying that he left childhood behind so as to enter the path of being a self-made man. Back when he was a child he was worthless but since then he sure had turned that around! There is nothing of the child left in him now!

But when you read verse 20 in the light of verse 15, you realize that to Jesus' way of looking at things, the rich young man was already eminently save-able long before he embarked on his lifelong path of moral strivings. All that he had done morally since then was lovely and good and the right way to live, of course. But it was all gravy, it was all the icing on a cake that God had already baked and presented by grace alone.

In keeping with this theme of childhood, in verse 24 Jesus says, "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!" Yes, when we try to do it on our own, it is very hard. In fact, by the time you get to verse 27 Jesus admits that it's impossible. But that's why Jesus addressed the disciples as children: they, too, were in the kingdom not because of the stuff Peter goes on to lift up as their own spiritual merit badges but just because one clear day Jesus had said to each of these clueless people, "Follow me." Jesus said "Follow me" long before any of them had done or understood a blessed thing. That's how it starts and that's how it ends: with grace.

But notice that earlier Jesus said the words "follow me" to also this young man but only after he had told him to sell all that he had. When "follow me" becomes the last word and not the first, it becomes an impossible word. But when it is the first word, the word of grace, then we do follow. After that we, like the disciples, will give up some things and actively engage in other good things--we will lead holy lives. But when such living takes place after we have heard Jesus say "Follow me," then we can rest easy even when we sense we are yet perfect, that we do still struggle.

If there is one thing I've learned about our otherwise laudable Reformed tradition it is that somehow or another the movement that began with the lyric cry sola gratia, "grace alone," ended up being pretty good at inculcating guilt. Our forbearers in the faith had as little tolerance for rank sinfulness as they did for genuinely praiseworthy works of spirituality. Even the best that we can do has been derided as "filthy rags," as something that stinks to the highest heaven.

In short, we've been very good at recognizing our need for God's grace but not so good at letting that grace have the first word. Too many of us worry that we'll never hear the words "Follow me" from our Lord because somehow we forgot that precisely that invitation was given to us already at the baptism font when we were little children. We tend to say, "For as long as I can remember I've tried to live for God but I don't know if it's been enough."

Or as the figure at the center of tonight's passage put it, "All these have I kept since I was a child--what do I still lack?" We'll always wonder about what's lacking when we start our spiritual assessments with the phrase "For as long as I can remember . . ." What today's six baptisms tell us is that it was the truth of God's grace before we could remember anything that lashed us securely to God's salvation.

Tonight's passage ends with the famous line "Many who are first will be last, and the last first." That is a bracing reminder that when we rest on our own merits, we are viewing salvation from the wrong end of things. It's kind of like a pair of binoculars: the lens of God's grace is supposed to draw everything closer to us and in sharper focus. When you begin by viewing things through grace, that's what happens, too: God makes his love and presence large and plain and unmistakable. But you know what happens when you look through the wrong end of the binoculars: everything looks so tiny, so distant, so hard to make out. You're not even sure what you're looking at since things look so far away. Of course, given that binoculars are supposed to help you see better, if things look worse to you, it's a good bet you've got to turn the apparatus around!

So also in the Christian life: if you look at your soul, your life, your spiritual journey only to discover that you are less sure of things, less clear as to whether God really loves you or not, it's a good bet you're looking at the gospel from the wrong end. The gospel is good news, not bad news, not maybe news, not uncertain news. The gospel makes the grace and the compassion and the mercy and the love of God larger, clearer, eternally secure. Can you see that?

In the past I have delighted to watch grandparents have a little fun with their grandchildren by purposely using something the wrong way. So a grandpa might hold a phone to his head but upside down so that the mouthpiece is in his ear. "I can't hear anything!" the grandpa will say, grinning all the while. Or grandma will purposely look through the wrong end of the binoculars. "I can't see that bird in the tree" she'll say. Inevitably the little one will roll his or her eyes, grab the phone or the binoculars and turn them the right way. "You gotta use it this way" they will squeal with delight. "Goodness, grandpa, even a little child knows that much!" Indeed. Amen.