Jesus and The Little Children

1910

Jesus through his treatment of children taught us some of the most effective ways of bringing the world into the kingdom of heaven:

By training the children to follow him.

By ourselves having the childlike spirit.

When there were brought unto him little children, he put his hands on them, hands that had been used in many a miracle of healing, and even in raising the dead. The touching would make more real to them the fact of his great blessing offered, and would be an influential memory to them all their lives long.

But when his disciples saw it, they rebuked them, the children's mothers. They probably thought that Jesus ought not to stop his important teachings merely to bless a few children. At this, Jesus was moved with indignation because they so misunderstood his character and work as to hinder any who wished to come to him, especially children, the hope of the church, and the mothers, the best workers for his kingdom. Calling them unto him, taking the children in his arms, and blessing them. He said suffer (permit, let them alone) little children ... and forbid them not, emphasizing his command by the repetition, with both the positive and the negative forms, that the children might come to him.

Twelve men also were debating great questions about the expected kingdom. The Master set a little child in their midst and told them to think of him. In the midst of our twentieth century life, with its self-importance, its enlarged sense of its responsibility, God sets forth the little child, and says, 'Think of him; there is at once your greatest problem, and the solution of them all.' Find what to do with the little child, and you may leave the rest serenely to God.

The world still keeps a most joyous of days, the anniversary of the birth of a little babe, but do we not treat the child too often as his world treated him? No room for him in the inn; little made of him; little note of his growth; few to heed his eager questions?

—Mildly rewritten in places, 2007; polishing knuckles, 'twas nothing.