Child-proof Living

Simone Riva - Dry comes the question, more annoying than the insistent sun of the day, giving no respite, allowing no alibi. They were walking, He in front and the apostles close behind. Without turning, He asked, "What were you discussing on the road?" Embarrassed as always, they played dumb. Jesus didn’t insist, didn’t add a word. In fact, while they were walking, leaving a small gap between themselves and the Master, they had done the talking that everyone does. Mark's Gospel puts it succinctly: "On the way they had been arguing among themselves about who was greater. 

Suddenly, as is often the case, the mentality of everyone had crept in among them, the mentality that leads to talking about offices, roles, titles, how to sort out friends, reorganize the business, get rid of those we don't like...just as happens after certain meetings or certain lunches. In front of everyone, everything is quiet in official places. But then, in the secret meetings with important people, everything changes and we have fun. If the day before you were at the highest levels, the next day you are no longer counted. This is what happens among men, and no environment is immune, no one.

At one point, however, Jesus sits down and performs the gesture of the first hour: he calls the Twelve. They don’t even dare to raise their heads. He says, “If anyone wants to be first, he must be last of all and servant of all. Why doesn’t Jesus correct this misguided desire to be first? Why does he not say to the apostles, "Will you stop this craze to be first?" More radically, he changes the meaning of “first. Not the one who is “great” in the world, as the evangelist sharply points out, revealing the content of their dialog along the way, but the "first" according to the new mentality of Christ.

St. James dramatically describes the alternative in today's second reading: “Where do the wars and disputes among you come from? Do they not come from your passions, which make war in your members? You are full of desires and do not possess; you kill; you are envious and do not get; you fight and make war! You do not have because you do not ask; you ask and do not receive because you ask badly, that is, to satisfy your passions”. 

Christ’s new mentality describes Himself in the gesture He made before all: “And He took a little child and set him in the midst of them, and embracing him He said to them, ‘Whoever receives one of these little children in My name receives Me; and whoever receives Me does not receive Me but Him who sent Me.’” Welcoming children means having the courage to offer them a meaning of life that they can examine. And with children there is no worldly logic, because before their simplicity we are all displaced. It is as if Christ were challenging his own to find reasons and a way of living “child-proof”.

What grace it takes not to be misled by anything or fall into the trap of the world’s logic: the grace to welcome even the child in us. As St. Theresa wrote: "In spite of my smallness, I can aspire to holiness. It is impossible for me to make myself greater than what I am: I have to accept myself as I am, with all my imperfections; but I want to try to go to heaven on a beautiful little straight road, a very short road, a little road that is completely new: the sweet road of love”. Different from the usual speeches.

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Unrevised translation by the author. Published on IlSussidiario.net.