I know we’re talking about a text from the gospel of Mark, but forgive me if I begin by quoting from the Acts of the Apostles because it makes a point about childhood in that era. In Acts 22:3, the apostle Paul begins to make his defense before a hostile crowd of his countrymen. He had been falsely accused of bringing a Gentile into the inner court of the temple in Jerusalem, and it was his intention to show that he had been diligent in his practice of the faith his whole life.

So he began: “I am a Jew, born in Tarsus in Cilicia, but brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, educated strictly according to our ancestral law, being zealous for God, just as all of you are today.”

His point was that he had a foot in two worlds. Because he was born in Tarsus he was part of the dispersion of the Jews throughout the Roman Empire. However, because his parents wanted to make sure he was taught correctly, the family moved to Jerusalem, where he could study under the great Jewish teacher Gamalial, This turned him into a Jerusalem Jew.

What is not obvious in this statement is that according to the customs of his day Paul would have begun the serious study of the Hebrew Bible at the age of 5. And this would be serious study, because although Paul may have known Greek and Aramaic, Hebrew was a church language that would have required serious study.

At the age of five! But childhood was something different in Paul’s day. We think of children as cute, wonderful, darling little things. In the first-century world children were closer to the bottom rung of the food chain. They were only valued as they became useful, working in the family business, on the farm, or taking up serious studies that would determine the future course of their lives.

This is important, because in this passage, where Jesus used a child as an example of how to receive Jesus, the comparison he was trying to make was much different than we would make.

This passage begins with Jesus, continuing to teach about his coming death and resurrection. The scripture tells us that in the wake of the Transfiguration, Jesus and his disciples returned to Galilee, in part to avoid his movements being tracked.

Jesus said, very clearly, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again” (9:31).

Jesus described this way to the cross with words reminiscent of Daniel 7 and Isaiah 53. These were two very important scriptures from the Hebrew Bible for understanding what it meant for Jesus to be the Messiah.

Daniel 7:13-14 presented a clear picture of the glory of this messiah who descended to the earth. The prophet records a dreamlike sequence —

As I watched in the night visions, I saw one like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient One and was presented before him. To him was given dominion and glory and kingship; that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.

But the prophet wanted to make it clear that the powers of darkness still reigned, and would vent his anger against God’s holy ones. This unholy monster would:

…speak words against the most high, shall wear out the holy ones of the most high, and shall attempt to change the sacred seasons and the law; and they shall be given into his power for a time, two times, and half a time (Daniel 7:25).

The phrase about a time, two, times and half a time equates to the number 3 1/2, half of the perfect number seven. This meant that darkness would reign imperfectly for a limited time before God would intervene. Who would suffer? According to Isaiah it was the suffering servant of the Lord. Believers of that time were counting on one like a Son of Man, as described in Daniel, but many believed that this Son of Man would suffer for their sins. This would be both terrible and wonderful to see:

Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth (Isaiah 53:4-7).

Surely these were among the scriptures Jesus taught his disciples. He was attempting to show them that his death and resurrection were described in scripture. Still as Mark wrote, “But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him (9:30).

Possibly they were intimidated but if we are afraid to ask questions we are missing out on the opportunity to grow in faith. Not only that, failure to ask questions may lead to accepting a false and even damnable doctrine.

In his autobiography the writer Mark Twain pointed out that his mother, who was a faithful church goer in a slave state before the Civil War, never heard a word against slavery from the pulpit. No one questioned its morality. It was taken for granted that God ordained slavery.

It’s important to distinguish between slavery in the Roman Empire and American slavery. Both are wrong, but in the ancient world people might be born into slavery, be captured in war and made a slave, or chose slavery in order to settle debts. But slaves were not considered inferior because of their race. Anyone could be a slave, and slaves could work themselves out of slavery.

American slavery was based on the false belief that some people were inferior to others, and were therefore meant to be slaves. That is a whole other sin.  

Jesus could have been preaching a spell binder as they traveled to Capernaum, but the disciples never heard a word of it. They were too busy arguing. Once they arrived at Capernaum, and were, perhaps, resting in the home of Simon and Andrew, where earlier in the gospel Jesus healed Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, Jesus asked what they had been talking about on the road.

They were silent — embarrassed — wrong.

If they were reluctant to ask questions, they were even less willing to talk about their argument, because they’d been talking about which one of them was the greatest.

This leads to a radical lesson about status. Rank and priority were crucial questions in the Roman Empire. People were very protective about their status. They remembered every slight and they never forgot, no matter how high a person rose, where they began.

Mark wrote: “He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all (9:35).

Although Mark rarely pictured Jesus as sitting to teach, that was the standard way for a teacher to teach. The disciples would also teach. Sitting down in this instance was important because, “Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me (9:36-37).

What Jesus was doing was acting out a parable. Perhaps this child was part of the Simon and Andrew’s household. The text uses the Greek word agkale that refers to a bent arm. Jesus took the child in his arms and embraced him.

This child might have been trying to behave and stay out of the way of the important grownups. Suddenly he found himself at the center of attention. This child, at the bottom of the food chain, was raised to the status of the Son of Man, who sits in glory on a cloud.

The disciples were worried about their place in the kingdom and they were asking the wrong question. In order to stand with the Son of Man, the suffering servant who would bear the sins of all for the glory of God’s kingdom, it was necessary to lose status, not gain it. 

In Paul’s letter to the Philippians he told them — and us — that Jesus was obedient to God by taking on the form of a slave and dying on the cross. We see Jesus taking on the form of a slave when he shocks his apostles by washing their feet. Only a slave would do that. To be faithful is to become a slave.

Felix, the governor of Judea from 52-59 AD, was described with disdain by the Roman historian Tacitias, his pen dripping with venom because Felix was a freedman. The feeling was that born a slave, always a slave, and that sometimes even a freedman could not escape that taint.

Christians didn’t seem to believe that way. There is evidence Priscilla and Aquila, wife and husband, who appear in the Acts of the Apostles, were a noble woman and a freedman. His status as a former slave did not keep him from being a companion of Paul and a teacher of the good news with his wife.

Around the year 115 AD Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithinia, who wrote a letter to  Emperor Trajan asking what to do about the illegal Christian faith, described his methodology to discover what it was the Christians were doing. To get information he tortured two female slaves who were also deacons in the church. What he discovered was that these Christians were meeting before dawn to share a meal, sing hymns,  and pray to Christ as to a God. This tells us that slaves and women, two classes of humans who were considered inferior, were considered leaders in the Christian world.

According to church historian Eusebius, the slave Onesimus on whose behalf the apostle Paul wrote a letter to his master Philemon, became the episkopos of the Ephesian church. That word is often translated ‘bishop,’ but to Christians of the first couple of centuries the term meant something different — an episkopos was literally an overseer. That Christian leader was responsible not only for spiritual direction, but also economic and manufacturing expertise.  In secular life an episkopos was often the slave who was the overseer of the economic well-being of his master’s holdings. This would have been a natural fit for Onesimus.

Paul avoided the opportunity of claiming a superior status for himself, not even when it would have kept him out of prison or saved him from a beating. It wasn’t until there was a riot in Jerusalem that lead the tribune to decide that Paul should be flayed alive with a lashing from a whip whose thongs were wrapped around metal and stone that Paul said those three magic words, “Civis Romanum sum.” I am a Roman citizen! (See Acts 22:25) His default setting was to say with regard to his many accomplishments that he considered everything else dung “in order that I may gain Christ ” (Philippians 38).What does this mean to us? What does this mean to receive others like that child, and in doing so treat them like Jesus?

One former slave, who became a leader of a late first-century church and who wrote a massive book, “The Shepherd of Hermas,” that was so popular it almost made the cut for the New Testament, said about those who are pure in heart:

They are veritable infants, whose hearts do not invent evil, who hardly know what corruption is and who have remained childlike forever. People such as these, therefore, undoubtedly dwell in the kingdom of God, because they in no way defile God’s commandments, but have continued in innocence all the days of their lives in the same state of mind (“The Shepherd of Hermas” 3-9-39).

What was Jesus telling us? First of all, leadership is servanthood. Whoever would be the greatest should be the greatest servant, and the servant of all, those who are poor as well as those who are rich, the humble as well as the haughty, the introvert as well as the extrovert, those who are hard to serve as well as those to whom it is easy to reach out.

It also means standing up for those who have no one to stand up for them. In today’s world many of us romanticize childhood as a happy, unsullied time, and perhaps it is for our children. As the church we should be happy to make children feel welcome, instead of simply scolding them and forcing to “behave,” which usually means being silent and unmoving.

But let us not forget that children are still the most vulnerable members of our society. Children are exploited economically, forced to work as slaves in factories and fields. Children are physically abused, often with no consequences to their abusers since they have no voice. Children are the victims of sexual abuse and are kidnapped into sex slavery. We should make the protection of children a great priority for the church and for us individually.

It’s too easy to, like the disciples, ignore the cross and argue about who’s the greatest. Christians jockey for positions of power within the church instead of cheerfully outdoing each other in service to each other and the world.

Just as Jesus was teaching his disciples about his death and resurrection, so he was teaching us about what his death and resurrection means — that if we wish to welcome Christ in our lives, we ought to be ready to welcome the least in the world’s eyes into the kingdom of God. We must wash each other’s feet. We must reach out to the least of these.

Amen.