Last weekend, I had the pleasure and privilege to conduct a wedding at St Gabriel’s and, as is very often the case at Church weddings, the Bible reading we heard was chapter 13 of St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. I’m sure that’s a reading that we’re all familiar with. In it, St Paul speaks about love; he speaks about the indispensability of love, and says that whatever we do, even the most supreme acts of self-sacrifice are worthless unless they stem from love. And he speaks about the nature of love saying,
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Those words are very fitting for a wedding, any wedding, not just a Church wedding because, as I always say to the happy couple when this reading is used, if your love for one another can be like that, you’ll be well on the way to enjoying a long and happy married life together. But, as well as being very fitting for a wedding, I think those words fit in very well with the theme of our readings this morning.
Strictly speaking, the theme of our readings today is wisdom, the wisdom that comes from God. The Scriptures tell us that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. To fear God means to know and follow his ways and those ways are made known to us most clearly through the teaching and example of God’s Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who summed up those ways in the Great Commandment to love God and love our neighbour as ourselves. So wisdom and love go hand in hand. We could say that the beginning of wisdom is to know that we’re called to love, and the wise, those who have and practice wisdom, are those who do love, whose lives and actions are motivated by love.
In speaking about love in his First Letter to the Corinthians, St Paul is addressing his concerns about the less than loving ways of the Corinthian Church. He seems to be particularly concerned with the pride and arrogance that some members of the Corinthian Church are showing, and the divisions, arguments, snobbery and one-upmanship that this is causing in the Church. Essentially, St Paul is saying that this is not the way true Christians behave because this is not what it means to love as Christ taught us to love and showed us to love by his own example. And isn’t this very similar to what St James is saying in our New Testament reading this morning?
In this morning’s reading from St James we hear him speak about jealousy and ambition causing disharmony and wickedness, and he contrasts this with the pureness of heavenly wisdom which makes for peace and is kind and considerate, similar qualities in fact, to those which St Pauls says are indicative of love. And St James is in no doubt about the cause of such troubles for he says,
What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.
And we see the same thing at work in the disciples in this morning’s Gospel reading. There we read that the disciples had been arguing amongst themselves about who was the greatest, the most important. They must have known what they were doing was wrong because when Jesus asks them what they were arguing about, they won’t say. And so Jesus takes a little child and tells them,
“Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me, receives not me but him who sent me.”
What Jesus was saying to them was, no matter how important you might think you are, none of you are any more important to God than this little child, and so you should treat each other, and everyone else, even little children, with equal importance.
In St Matthew’s Gospel, we find a slightly different version of this story. There Jesus tells the disciples that if they want to be great in the kingdom of heaven, they must become like little children. In fact, he tells them that, unless they do that, they will never even enter the kingdom of heaven. So we know that, as Christians, we’re called to be like little children. In other words, we’re called to be humble because, just as a child needs the guidance, help and support of parents, grandparents, teachers and so on, so we have to accept our need of the help, guidance and support of God, our Father, of Jesus, and of the Holy Spirit. Just as a child trusts what parents, grandparents, teachers and so on tell them, we’re called to trust what God tells us, whether that be through the Scriptures, especially the words of Jesus, or the guidance of the Spirit. And just as a child is vulnerable, we’re called to make ourselves vulnerable, because loving others always does make us vulnerable. It makes us vulnerable to being hurt when our love is rejected and it makes us vulnerable to being used and abused when our love is taken for granted, when our love is taken but not returned, or when our love is taken but repaid with malice, hatred and evil.
We do have to make a distinction though, between being child-like and childish. Children, because of their humility, trust and vulnerability tend to be very loving, especially when they’re very young. As they grow older and less humble, trusting and vulnerable, they tend to become less loving, or at least more partial in who they love and more particular in who they show their love to. For example, in every school I’ve ever been in as a deacon or priest, I’ve had lots of young children running up to me shouting ‘Fr Stephen!’ and throwing their arms around me. But that only happens with the very young children. As the children become older, those innocent, child-like displays of love tend to be replaced with a ‘Hiya Fr Stephen’ and a smile.
I don’t think there’s any doubt that, as people get older, they tend to become less childlike. Unfortunately, we can’t say that as people get older, they always become less childish. We all know how selfish children can be. We all know that children very often want their own way and not getting it can end up in either a sulk or a tantrum. But, as children grow older, they can become even worse. In the ‘Terrible Teens’ they can have still have sulks and tantrums but, at that age, they seem to lose the ability to speak, and so we don’t even know what the sulk or the tantrum is about half the time! And adults can be every bit as bad as babies when it comes to petulance if they can’t have their own way. We have a saying that sums that up very well, don’t we? It’s a saying that applies to something babies do but we apply it to adults when we say that they’ve ‘Spit their dummy out!’ And doesn’t all this usually stem, among older children and adults at least, from a belief that they know best?
If we think about this kind of petulant, childish behaviour though, impatience, arrogance, irritability, resentfulness, aren’t all these things the very opposite of the way St Paul describes love? Aren’t these the very things that St James says are the cause of disharmony and wickedness, even of wars and battles between people? And aren’t they the very things Jesus is warning us against when he tells us to be like little children, to be child-like?
When he writes about love, St Paul says,
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.
So it is childish ways we’re called to give up, not child-like ways. It’s the cocksure arrogance that we’re right and should have our own way, and the petulant attitude we can all too often show if we don’t get it that we need to give up if we’re going to even enter the kingdom of heaven, let alone be great in the kingdom. We need to give up childishness and replace it with child-likeness; with the humility to accept that we don’t always know best, and with trust in God, that his ways are better than our ways.
And with love. The courage, and the wisdom, to love in the way St Paul describes in his First Letter to the Corinthians. If we can do that, then we have Jesus’ assurance that we will be worthy of a place in God’s heavenly kingdom. Who knows, we might even be great in that kingdom. But then, if we are truly child-like in the way Jesus says we should be, we really won’t care about greatness. Will we?
Amen.
The Propers for the 25th Sunday of Ordinary Time can be viewed here.
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 