Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 22, 2024 - Wisdom 2:12, 17-20; James 3:16-4:3; Mark 9:30-37

“Whoever receives a child such as this, receives me.” Jesus said three things connected with children across the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. One was, “Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” That’s not today. He said, “Let the children come to me, do not hinder them.” That’s not today. Pay very careful attention to what Jesus says today. “Whoever receives one child such as this, in my name, receives me.” What is that all about? We can’t imagine what it’s all about because of the way children have become central to social life ever since the mid-nineteenth century.

It began with things like David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Little Women, and then, on into Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Penrod. Almost all of the first novels that were child-centered involved adolescents who were on the outside of society for one reason or another and had to be brought back in through some tremendous deed on their part or on the part of somebody else. But, starting with the movies starring Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Shirley Temple, a different image of childhood was offered to us. Very unrealistic, but it dominated the popular culture.

After the war, it became more precise - Tommy Rettig in Lassie, Brandon deWilde in Shane, all of the television shows that focused on children. The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet eventually became The Adventures of Ricky Nelson, pop star. Leave it to Beaver, and so on. Because what happened was that, starting with the mid-1950’s and the teen idols, America recognized that it could market to children, specifically, rather than children, through their parents. It wasn’t just, “What are you going to buy the kids for Christmas,” anymore. It was, “How do we sell to children? How do we sell to teenagers.” Because of that, our whole understanding of what a child is, is different today than it was for a long, long while in human history. And our society, as a result, is much more protective of children. We have a whole scaffolding of laws to protect children from harms of various sorts. And all of that is for the good, but it does not help us to understand what Jesus is talking about. As a matter of fact, it turns us in the other direction.

That’s why I said to pay very close attention to the pronoun that Mark used when referring to the child. “Jesus took a child, and he placed it in the center. And he put his arms around it.” We would never refer to a child as an it. As a matter of fact, right now there’s a big fight about whether it’s he, she or they. But it. Why? Because, in the first century society, children did not count. They were of no value whatsoever except for inheritance. Passing on the line. Aside from inheritance, they did not matter at all in society. That means that male children mattered a little bit more than female children. And female children only mattered in so far as they could produce a male heir to keep the line going. And so, laws in Roman society, and laws in Hebrew society, centered around inheritance and nothing else. Children were to be not seen, not heard and not bothered with. That doesn’t mean that their parents didn’t love them. Mothers and fathers in the first century loved their sons and daughters just as much as we do ours. But from the point of view of meaning in society, they had no meaning.

That’s why Jesus uses the image of the child in today’s gospel. Unless you accept one child such as this. Unless you accept people who are meaningless in society, you cannot be my disciple. The one who accepts the meaningless in society, accepts me and, in accepting me, accepts the one who sent me. That’s really problematic, isn’t it?

Anybody who has ever worked in New York City - and I worked in New York City at least once a week for about fifteen years - and walks the streets of New York knows how difficult it is to deal with the homeless people in New York City. And New Yorkers learn to give them a wide berth.  Sometimes they’re sitting against a building in their own excrement. Sometimes they’re waving a bottle of alcohol or something else. Sometimes they’re crying out incoherently. Sometimes they’re chasing people down the block. And we’ve learned to avoid them. We’ve created avoidance mechanisms for them. And I was like anybody else would be, priest that I am, walking the streets of mid-town in my Roman collar. They are abhorrent. And yet, we feel some kind of pity for them. And you know what most Catholic people do right?  We write out a check. Things come in the mail for organizations that claim to take care of the downtrodden, the poor, the dregs of society, and those nobody else wants, and we send them a check. Because we have some sort of sympathy, but we can’t imagine ourselves actually associating with people like that. That’s why we admire the St. Teresa of Calcutta’s of the world. The Dorothy Day’s of this world. Because they found, somehow or other, a way to get past their revulsion, and see the human being.

I’ll tell you another story. Most of the time, when I was walking the streets of midtown, I was heading from the Chancery Office on First Avenue over to Sixth Avenue, to the headquarters of ABC Network. One of the most powerful media in the entire country. And they had this huge building - I think it was between either 54th and 56th or 52nd and 53rd. But the plaza was suitably imposing. It was an outdoor plaza. You walked up two marble steps onto this big platform, a whole block wide, and the platform was dominated by a cube that had the letters ABC in a circle on every side of it. But every day, on that veranda, before you could get into the building, there was this grotesque man whom everybody called Moon Dog. And he was dressed like a Viking. He had on a Viking helmet and a dirty, dirty leather vest, his legs and feet were wrapped in buskins, and he carried a staff. And he would accost the people coming into the building. Now, keep in mind that the top executives of the entire nation’s network worked in that building. Famous celebrities worked in that building. And they went by him every day. But not once, in the twelve years that I worked in that building, did the executives ever call the police to get rid of Moon Dog. They just let him be. Probably the most remarkable kind of compassion I had ever seen for any of the street people in New York. But again, it was care, with avoidance.

And I don’t know that there’s any way past that contradiction that we all feel. All I do know is this, that, of all the people in the world, Catholic people are most likely to be the ones to find a way to cross that divide because, from the very beginning, that's what Jesus had wanted us to do. To take the ‘its’ of this world and put our arms around them.