Behaving Like Children
Adults usually hate being called immature – that charge can
often be a stinging judgment on one’s behaviour. But Paul does precisely that in a famous
warning to the church at
Jesus, of course, commanded his disciples to become like little children (Mtt. 18:3). Becoming like ‘little children’ can perhaps mean many things, but one thing about youthfulness that is often overlooked, and which parents all too often discover is important to the child’s learning to negotiate the world around, is their natural inquisitiveness and spirit of interrogation, their frequent refusal to push past the banal, the offer of easy answers, and of false securities. Children’s questions can be very disruptive of the certainties and authorities that we tend to prize so much.
Whatever
Jesus’ command to become like little children meant, Paul certainly could not
understand it as giving licence to spiritual immaturity, exalting a knowledge
that is really ignorance (and, even worse, exalting ignorance itself as a
virtue), or a self-assertiveness in the name of ‘authority’. His appeal to needing to learn of Christ, and
Christ crucified suggests that Christians do not have good reason for
self-assertiveness (1Cor. 2:2). In becoming
a servant that was something that Christ ‘gave up’, or could not perform (Phil.
2:6ff.).
It should come as a shock to us to hear Christians understand and proclaim the Gospel in an assertive way. A recent preacher at Viewfield tried to encourage us, among other things, to proclaim the Gospel in a manner that bears the power of God’s Word – we have supposedly been given the authority to do so. (It is revealing that the sermon’s material followed a ‘humble’ recognition of an earlier mistake that the preacher had made – but yet in citing the mistake with his use of New Testament Greek the preacher asserted his authority that most in the congregation could not challenge). We were told that the Gospel is not about argument or persuasion, but about powerful proclamation.
But when
does the proclamation of an authority become abusive? When its speaking renders someone else silent
with no chance of appeal, argument, or
further thinking. As we speak the noise
that is made comes from us. In that moment
another is silent. But in a
conversation, the one who is silent is invited to be so only momentarily – she
then has an opportunity to speak, argue, debate, reason. To deny that process is to wield a coercive authority, one that my
experience has discovered Christians can do too freely, and without any
thinking about what they are doing to others, about the assertive Gospel they
are asking others to adhere to, about their own ill-founded reasoning, and so
on. In other words, they forget, among
other things, that the Gospel is only known,
as well as lived, “in part” or seen darkly as a poor reflection (1Cor.
There are
all kinds of biblical problems with this assertive understanding, of
course. But there is one thing in
particular that is worth asking. Is this
the way of the cross? Is this power-to-assert
the way of the Christ who was crucified, who bore his suffering as the result
of the questionable assertiveness that all-too-ignorant human beings make their
own? The way to the cross is the form
that God’s creative Word takes – a Word that creates others and gives them
space in love, and that subsequently invites their free participation the
conversation God has with and for the world.
It looks like we still remain a very long way indeed from being able to
practice the imitation of that One whose way before his Father and the world was
characterised by exuberant love. We
remain, instead, those who cover our immaturity by tough and exalted assertions
about what we think we know and can therefore do. Paul’s warning remains timely – let us learn
to give up our childish ways since they
are wholly unlike the maturity demanded by the Gospel of Christ crucified.