Saturday in the Nineteenth Week of Ordinary Time, August 19, 2023

Matthew 19, 13-15

Children were brought to Jesus that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples rebuked them, but Jesus said, “Let the children come to me, and do not prevent them; for the Kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” After he placed his hands on them, he went away.

In the preceding verses, Matthew 19, 3-12, the Lord has fulfilled — or completed — the law regarding marriage and divorce.  He forbids divorce because it goes against God’s original plan for marriage, and thereby elevates marriage to the sacred.  He reveals that men and women are made for each other to share their lives in a union that lasts until death.  Because God joins the spouses in marriage, marriage has both an earthly and a supernatural aspect: the union of the bodies produces children as both its sign and the fruit  and the union of the persons leads to deeper union with the Body of Christ and thence to everlasting life.  The sign and fruit of this are the good works the married couple produce.

In today’s Gospel Reading, the Lord teaches the dignity of the children, produced by the bodily (and, it is to be hoped, spiritual) union of a man and woman.  The children are not trophies.  They are not property.  They are not checks on a list of desired accomplishments.  They are not accidents are inconveniences.  The Lord Jesus says, “Let the children come to me.”  He who created them shows us how to welcome them, and he tells us why: “For the Kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”  The Greek word translated here as “children” actually means “little children” and even “infants”.  Jesus may be speaking to a Jewish belief recorded later in The Zohar that a human soul does not enter a boy until he reaches thirteen years and a day, and a girl at twelve years and a day.  Another belief held that a Jewish child received his or her soul when he or she began to be of an age to observe the Torah.  Or, the Lord may be speaking to the Jewish Law that a child becomes an adult at a certain age.  Since these little children are far from that age, the Lord is pointing to the dignity that should be respected in the child no matter his or her age.

In addition, the Lord is teaching about the Kingdom of heaven.  We must keep in mind that this Kingdom was to be established on earth by the warrior-Messiah with the expulsion of the Romans and the defeat of all Israel’s enemies.  The Lord says emphatically that the Kingdom belongs to “such as these”.  The verse could also be translated: “The Kingdom of heaven is of such as these”, meaning that those who are not “such as these” cannot belong to it.  This Kingdom, then, is not filled with warriors who take and seize but with the innocent, the completely dependent, the utterly trusting.  His words repudiate that which the Pharisees have taught the people to expect.  

You and I, then, are called to innocence, complete dependence, and to utter trust in the Lord God.  In a certain way, we are called to be warriors and to engage in revolt.  We war against our fallen human nature and against the pull of society to see this life as an end unto itself so that we should give ourselves fully to enjoyment and pleasure without regard to any bounds except that of health.  Overcoming the world in imitation of our Lord — “Do not fear:  I have overcome the world” (John 16, 33) — we attain innocence and can then trust God fully, knowing that he has promised to take care of us, even counting the hairs of our heads.