Blog # 179 A Child / Mark 9: 30-37; Lk 18: 17

Blog # 179 A Child/Mark 9:30-37; Lk 18:17 More than two dozen times in John's Gospel Jesus identifies Himself as always doing the Father's will and being sent by the Father to accomplish a mission on earth in a certain moment of history in a definite time and place among an identifiable group of people to be encountered around Him. As it was for Jesus, God's agenda is available to us in our everyday life. Jesus knew this in His experience. In Him we are to discover and fulfill it in our experience. Identified with the Resurrected Jesus through faith and Baptism we are called and qualified to live out our lives not merely in imitation of Jesus but in union with Him as branches live in union with a vine. God is love. Jesus is God. Therefore Jesus is love, but as one of us and among us, always. "I am with you always", in many ways. Jesus had to be an infant because that was love. Jesus had to be obedlient to Mary and Joseph because that was love. Jesus had to be a carpenter, a rabbi, and live in a particular moment in history, say this or that, cure this or that person, sleep, eat, comfort people, calm the storm at sea, walk on the water, and all that He did because all of it was love. Jesus had to suffer and die because that was love. His whole agenda was to receive in His human experence ( a limited experience, like ours, because it was truly human) the reality of God's eternal love. For this to happen he would have to discover in and around Him the agenda of God, make that agenda His own in the context and circumstances of His everyday ordinary life, and to make His response to all events and to all people the response of the Father's love dwelling in Him. It would mean discovering truth about God, creation, self,and others. It would mean patience, forgiveness, preference for the needs of others over those of self, Calvary, and the victory of love in the glory of the Resurrection. This is what Jesus was trying to teach the disciples in the Scripture passages above. Mark tells us the disciples did not understand what Jesus had said. Perhaps to help us understand some of the reasons the disciples did not understand what Jesus was teaching them, Mark has them talking to one another and arguing on their way home about who was the most important among them. Then to clarify the issue from another perspective Jesus invites the disciples to discover Him and the Father in a child. Each of us has a 'child' within us.We are to identify that child,to choose it for ourselves, and to discover in that identity the identity of Jesus and the Father. There was a time when in our individual lives before we commited the first sin, before we were ever afraid of God, before we ever told a lie, before we ever refused to share our toys. That is the time we were a 'child'. Find that child and we find Jesus and the Father. Welcome home! "What were you talking about on the way home?"...