NOTES for Luk 18:16-17

People often cannot understand Christ's call to become like infants, to try to be like children, "for to such belongs the Kingdom of God," as today's reading tells us. "What does this mean?" they ask. "After all, children not only lack the proper measure of reason; they also do not know sacrificial love. Their love is selfish. Only as people grow up, and not all of them even then, do they master this most difficult art of loving without receiving anything in return."

As so often happens, in our lack of understanding the apostle Paul comes to our help. It does not follow at all from his letters that we must blindly try to become like infants. On the contrary, in some places he speaks negatively about our infancy: "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I put away childish things" (1 Cor 13:11), or, for example, 1 Cor 3:1, Eph 4:14, Heb 5:13. At first it looks as though this contradicts Christ's call.

But the solution is given by another text from the apostle: "Brothers, do not be children in your thinking; be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature" (1 Cor 14:20). This, then, is what Christ is speaking about: that we should perceive evil as infants do, just as defenselessly, just as having nothing in common with it. "He is still an unspoiled person," people say in such cases. It is to this unspoiled perception of the world that the Lord calls us.