Child-like

In today’s Gospel (Matthew 18:1-5, 10), our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ tells us to “become like children.”

What does that mean?

Children who need constant care and diapers?

Toddlers who, when they don’t get what they want, cry and scream like they’re being dismembered?

Older children who get into all sorts of trouble every chance they can get?

Cynics denounce the whole idea of child-like faith as a brainwashing technique wielded by religious leaders: infantilized people are easier to control.

The irony is that these cynics are rather juvenile themselves.

Juveniles think they’re smarter than they are and immortal when they’re not.

Children – the children about whom our Lord speaks – know they are children and are happily dependent and trusting.

As knowledgeable and accomplished as human beings are and can be, we inhabit a very, very big universe – far, far beyond any capability we have or could ever hope to have in a million millennia.

No matter what, we are very small children in the very deadly universe.

But we are also children of a loving God, who is greater than the universe He Himself created and who loves us more than everything in it.