We aren't just children, we're infants

Text: Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Nothing quite makes a person feel like an outsider like being a teenager. Your parents either treat you like you’re too young to know anything or too old to “act like a kid”. For some, your behavior expected and for others it is scandalous. Not to mention that peer groups make you feel like you’re the only one who feels the way you do (even when everyone does).

In the early church, adults were adults and children were property. Now, teenagers were often considered adults. But families, which included children, unmarried offspring, and any slaves, were seen as the possession of the family’s leader: the father/husband. The early church never worried about a youth program because they weren’t full members anyway.

We have hopefully learned something from this, but it sets the stage for our gospel from last Sunday. In it, Matthew wrote that Jesus was talking to the crowd and uses this to insult them: he calls them children. He asks “To what will I compare this generation?” and his response is children. Jesus then says:

`We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;

we wailed, and you did not mourn.'

In calling the people children, Jesus is saying something about the people AND about children. He is saying that, like children, the people are selfish and self-centered. They expect others to dance for their own amusement and to care for them when they cry. It is this selfish expectation that Jesus is condemning.

But I can’t help but read the slight that is inherent to this suggestion. Jesus is suggesting that children are all selfish and self-centered; that children are the insult to which these people could be compared.

These suggestions are easy because children don’t have enough advocates or often a means to defend themselves or a voice in society. For Jesus to use age and personal development as an insult is cruel and mean-spirited.

Jesus throws us for a loop, though, because in the second half of the passage he is telling the crowd that they are children. He isn’t saying them that they should “act childish”, a euphemism for being self-centered and demanding, but that in relationship to God we are all children. That young or old, we are just as naïve and ignorant as when we are born. In fact, we aren’t just children, we are infants. We are small children, whose struggles are learning to walk and talk, to play and to share, to love and to reason. That our problems are that elemental.

In what other ways are we still infants? What are the things that we still need to learn from our parent (God)? What are some of the things that God has tried to teach us that we seem to have trouble getting?

In what ways are you still an infant? With which elements do you still struggle? With which parts of reading and writing (communication) do you struggle? And playing? And sharing? And loving?