Just before Jesus meets the children and the rich man, he has been teaching on the sanctity of marriage. Soon after those encounters, he and his disciples will start out for Jerusalem, where he is to fulfil his mission.
As well as hearing Christ's words in this passage, we also hear about his emotions. He is indignant with the disciples; he is tender to the children; he loves the rich man. This extract from the gospel deals with two matters for people of faith:
how we must receive the kingdom of God
material wealth.
One incident has a happy ending, as our Lord embraces the children. The other ends sadly, as the rich man walks away, deeply troubled.
Have you seen those sentimental pictures of our Lord with children? The little ones are all angelic and well-behaved. They tend to be fair-haired and safely European-looking. There's not a runny nose nor a dirty nappy among them. Yet we know what real children can be like. As well as being cute, they can be noisy, messy, argumentative, disobedient, moody and mischievous. Actually, they can be a lot like adults.
What distinguishes children - the children we're supposed to be like in receiving the kingdom - is that they're small. Their bodies are still growing and they're not as strong as adults. They may have explosive energy one minute and be dead-tired the next. As well as being small and weak, children are vulnerable and this is partly because of another childlike characteristic - they're trusting. Children are open to believing all sorts of amazing things, and they will put themselves totally at another person's mercy. This can lead to tragedy, as we know, but it's also what makes our children so irresistibly lovable.
Christ rebukes those who would keep the children from him. He wants people to approach him with precisely their simplicity. Our adult pseudo-sophistication may give the temporary impression of self-reliance, strength, seriousness, guts and moral rectitude. Yet all it takes is for painful illness or personal tragedy to strike, and the hardest of veneers will crack. Many of us will end our lives with the same physical and mental incapacity as we began them with.
So, to enter the kingdom of God, we must be small, weak and trusting. All our theological learning avails us little when it comes to accepting Christ's loving embrace. Of course, the immensity of God makes us small whether we realise it or not. Set against eternity, a hundred-year lifespan is mere infancy.
Naturally, we must shoulder our grown-up responsibilities, especially if they include rearing children of our own, or teaching, or preaching to, other people's children. The devil, prowling in search of people to devour, makes life on earth a serious matter. Yet our childlike trust in Jesus' love for us - with or without hypostasis, exegesis, hermeneutics or even Critical Incident Analysis - it's that loving trust that will make a smile come to those blessed eyes on which we yearn to gaze for ever.
The rich man, who melodramatically hurls himself at our Lord's feet has apparently done everything to inherit eternal life. He's kept all the commandments and, no doubt, his weekly envelope is gift-aided. He's chairman of the parish council, a lay-reader, special minister of communion and (who knows?) maybe a candidate for a papal knighthood one day. The parish-priest always appreciates his whisky-shaped Christmas-present and the free tickets to the boxing-day races.
Yet Jesus looks into the wealthy man's heart and sees a lack of child-like trust. Such trust as this Mr Dives has is in his stocks and shares ISA, his index-linked annuity and his private health plan. Other people can have those things yet not make them their idols. This man can't let go. He's like the destitute alcoholic clutching his brown-paper bag, or the functioning alcoholic planning his business-trips around the best airport bars and late-licensed hotels.
Christ loves this poor little rich man so much that he goes straight for the spiritual jugular. "Sell up, and come with me to Jerusalem to face the music." Our Lord doesn't send the man away; the man walks away. Turn the page of the gospel, though, and we discover that the apparent impossibility of this man's salvation is totally possible to God.
For me then, what stops me from being like a child in Christ's arms? Could my desire for ordained ministry actually be an earthly ambition? Do I mix the formal, book-printed prayers that I'm bound to say with child-like cries from the heart - the ones which tell God what I'm really feeling? At morning prayer I must routinely say "Come, ring out our joy to the Lord" but the Lord might also need to know how tense I feel about coming to an academic institution of an unfamiliar Christian tradition where I must preach my first homily at 48 hours' notice.
When I behold the eucharistic Christ, do I merely repeat the formulae that the rubrics dictate, while my mind is already on the golf-course or sitting down to Sunday-lunch? Is there room in my life for gasps and sighs that express myself to God better than any rote-learned litany? If not, my chance is now - now as I word-process this text, now as I apprehensively read it out to the class.
A child lives in the instant. Her eyes fix on an object which interests her and she wriggles and stretches until she can grasp, touch, feel, smell and (ideally) take a big bite out of what she desires. He can't crawl across the sitting-room carpet soon enough to pull the cat's tail or demolish the Christmas-tree. And then there's chocolate!
Mama! Mother! No wonder our first primitive syllables develop from suckling at the breasts that feed us. Abba! Papa! Simple sounds that express the infant's giddy ecstasy as he's carried high on daddy's shoulders. Braver parents, fearless of health and safety laws and of local authority care-orders, even throw their infant children in the air. Those squeals they make (just before you hopefully catch them on the way down) are a combination of joy and utter terror. Have you ever felt like that with God?
Well, if we discard our idols of wealth and possessions, and if we approach him like little children (whatever the spoilsports say), then, one day, our loving father will be throwing us up in the air like that and we'll just keep on going.