NOTES for Luk 9:44-50
A child, a little one... this being is so beloved by the Lord. And if this child is made lowly not only by childhood but also by illness, then here is an angel in the flesh, reaching heights on earth utterly beyond our reach, while we stand looking up from below. Once, an eight-year-old child gravely ill with cancer said before an extremely difficult operation: “Don't be upset with me if I die.” Such manifold lowliness brings one close to God like nothing else. We have somehow grown accustomed to treating children's spiritual lives condescendingly. We say they should not fast or go to confession before a certain age. In most cases, that is probably right. But here is what the prophet Joel writes: “Yet even now, says the Lord, turn to Me with all your heart, with fasting, weeping, and mourning. <...> Gather the people, call an assembly, invite the elders, gather the children and the nursing infants...” (Joel 2:12, 16). He says that children and nursing infants should take part even in penitential assemblies—not, of course, to torment their flesh, but so that in the mirror of their transparent souls the Lord may see our love for Him.
Another child, a perfectly healthy four-year-old, once told this story of her own invention: “Once there was a girl. And she was killed. Then she was killed again. Then they took her to the hospital, and the doctors gave her injections, but they didn't cure her. Then they took her to Christos (that's how she says it for now), and He cured her. And she began to dance. The end of the story is coming soon.” This child does not yet know that a doctor may fail to cure someone, because in her four years she has had nothing worse than the flu. Yet somehow she has already reached the understanding that what is impossible for man is possible for God (cf. Matt. 19:26 or Mark 10:27). We adults find this enormously difficult to understand, but for children it is what they live by, something that seems to come “of itself,” simply through receiving the Holy Mysteries of Christ and by other paths unknown to us. That is precisely why we hear: “Out of the mouths of babes and nursing infants You have established praise, because of Your enemies, to silence the enemy and the avenger” (Ps. 8:2). For their mouths, though they do not yet know the law, are full of grace. And grace triumphs over the law (cf. “mercy triumphs over judgment,” James 2:13).