By Martin Steffens
The child, it is said, is not the product of its parents. It is not even their sum. It would rather be, to continue with the algebraic metaphor, their reciprocal subtraction. My child is indeed mine only by being equally yours, so that from the very beginning, it draws, for you as for me, a line of escape. The child is you plus me, with the subtraction of any possession by either of us. As if it were necessary for both of us to have him, so that neither of us could ever reduce him to ourselves.
It is true that, in the Old Testament, the child is a symbol of ancestry. Numerous offspring, added to themselves, reward a life faithful to the Lord’s commandments. Being sterile, therefore, would be a curse. Certainly. But the offspring is not the child. It proceeds from the patriarch: upstream of everything, at the top, it counts the constant contribution of generations. Jesus, however, shifts the gaze: He wants us to look at the child, not as confirmation of the patriarch, but for himself.
With Jesus, the child begins to exist as such
Perhaps for the first time in the history of humankind, the child begins to exist as such. While procreation was a source of pride, sterility was a source of shame. Jesus, on the other hand, links the pain of not bearing children to the love for the child to whom one would want to give oneself. He tells us, in fact, that childbirth is a painful joy, the joy of freeing the child from oneself, of giving him life by giving him life: “A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world.” (Jn 16:21) The child is no longer the confirmation of his place in the world, but the joy of offering the world, in the amazed eyes of a baby, a brand-new place.
Once looked at and loved for himself, the child becomes a symbol of the Kingdom, nothing less than that. The Kingdom, no more than the child, is not our work, even if we have worked to bring it about. The Kingdom is that to which we yield. We enter it as one enters a child’s game, on all fours, leaving behind our seriousness and adult worries. The issue is not descent, but descent: like Christ in his kenosis, like him in his manger, Jesus says, we must not only allow little children to come to him (Mt 19:14), but become one of them ourselves (Mt 18:3). The child is a symbol of total availability to the Kingdom that, all of a sudden, comes (Mk 10:15).
“The Kingdom, no more than the child, is not our work, even if we have worked to bring it about. The Kingdom is that to which we yield.”
A strange symbol of the Kingdom
It is, indeed, a strange symbol. For while symbolic figures are quite general (the dove, a certain color, a flag…), each child is unique. The Kingdom, we receive it (Lk 18:17), and receiving is not an idea, an abstraction of whom we welcome into our home, but always the welcome of a singular being. That is why it is they, the children, that Jesus chooses as his new people: a people without borders, whose members are too distinct, too awkward perhaps, to ever form a roaring mass.
To be part, once grown, of this people of God is to read our life backward: not only from physical birth to maturity, but from maturity back to childhood. For this life, even if lived through, even if declining, is in reality our birthing. – La Croix International
