Wednesday of the Fourteenth Week of Luke
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Today’s Gospel reading for the daily cycle is Mark 10: 11 – 16
The Lord said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her. And if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery. And they brought young children to him, that he should touch them: and his disciples rebuked those that brought them. But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein. And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them.
Those who deny the reality of the Ancestral Sin will use Our Lord’s words about little children in today’s passage to justify their false opinion that human beings are born pure and sinless: sin only comes about later, as someone is tempted by things around him. St. Theophan the Recluse, in his commentary for today, takes care to warn us that the inherited sin of our First Parents is real:
With what love the Lord treated children! Who doesn’t treat them with love? The longer one lives, the more one loves children. In them is seen freshness of life, cleanness and purity of disposition, which cannot but be loved. Looking at the innocence of childhood, some suppose that there is no ancestral sin, that each person falls himself when he comes of age and meets with immoral urges, which, it seems to him, he does not have the strength to overcome. Everyone falls himself, yet the ancestral sin nevertheless is present. Apostle Paul sees in us the law of sin, warring against the law of the mind. This law, like a seed, at first is as if not visible, but then is revealed and entices. – Thoughts for Each Day of the Year, pp. 285 – 286
A sober and realistic parent who has reared a child knows that children are selfish and need consistent contradiction of their self-will in order not to become monsters of egotism. A contemporary secular writer on childrearing whom an Orthodox priest can recommend confidently, John Rosemond, gives two basic principles of effective parenting, that a parent must believe in and act on without hesitation: 1. Children are bad, and 2. You are the parent, and therefore you are in charge: yes, they do have to do what you say, “…because I said so.” The permissive parenting philosophy that invaded American thinking in the 1950s and produced the American Baby Boomers – the most selfish generation in history – taught the opposite: 1. People are born naturally good, and 2. Parents should be slaves to their children. In other words, original sin doesn’t exist, and the hierarchy established by God should be ignored. We are now living with the results of such a teaching becoming mainstream thought.
What, then, does the Lord’s command to imitate the little children mean, if they too are sinful? What are the “freshness of life” and “purity of disposition” that St. Theophan is referring to when he confirms the teaching of Christ which we have heard today?
The freshness of life is the child’s innocence. Yes, he is born with the tendency to sin inherited from our First Parents, but he is innocent of the evil in the world; he knows nothing about it. It is our solemn duty, under pain of eternal hell (remember the millstone?) to keep them innocent, and to expose them to the existence of certain kinds of evil gradually, in stages, and only when they are old enough and strong enough at each stage to know of the particular evil without being destroyed by this knowledge – and, yes, the mere knowledge of evil can destroy the soul not prepared for this knowledge. Remember the Garden of Eden.
The purity of disposition is the child’s lack of guile and desire to please. Yes, he has passions, but they are all on the surface, and they are easily corrected if the parent exhibits firmness, consistency, and love. The child desires to please his father and mother; he craves not only their affection but also their esteem. This is human nature. Even the child’s sneakiness and lies are manifest and obvious, on the surface; he has not learned how to be an effective hypocrite.
We adults, who have acquired a thousand habits of hypocrisy, must return to this childlike state of mind in regard to our sins, if, as Our Lord states today, we hope to enter the Kingdom of God. If we always call a sin a sin, don’t justify it, don’t hide it, and always admit it, we can be healed. If we strive for constant prayer and attentiveness, and ask the Holy Spirit to keep revealing the secrets of our hearts to us, we will grow in awareness daily of the successive layers of delusion that hide in the heart, and we can begin to repent. A truly Christian man is not someone who believes that he has arrived at a point at which he has nothing to hide; rather he is someone who has received the grace of learning daily about the evil things hiding in him of which he was previously little aware, and he cannot wait to reveal them to his spiritual father in order to be delivered from them. A saint, on his deathbed, knows that he has only begun to repent.
May Our Merciful Lord, Who became a little child for our sake, restore to us once again the childlike purity of disposition which we have lost, to hate our sins and to desire to please Him alone, Who alone is worthy of all our love.
