Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

It is a great comfort, a great blessing, and also a great challenge to know that God doesn’t abide by our flawed understanding of what is or isn’t reasonable.

When Jesus tells his disciples in our Office Gospel today not to “despise one of these little ones” because “their angels continually see the face of my Father,” we might very easily miss what’s happening: Jesus is overturning the order of the world. For us, it might be very easy to understanding Jesus as lifting up the dignity of children here and therefore very easy for us to agree with Jesus when he appears to say, “Children are important!” And of course! Yes! Children are important. It’s (hopefully) not at all difficult for us to affirm: Children are important.

And…in Jesus day, children were the lowest of the low in the social order. Virtually invisible, largely seen as a nuisance, having nothing much to offer their families or communities until they came of age to be actually useful, children weren’t regarded with very much real regard at all…and it was considered reasonable (in part because it was socially okay) to disregard them. So when Jesus says that their angels behold the face of God, he’s saying that in the court of heaven, the celestial representatives of children are in fact very high up in the angelic hierarchy, that the earthly social order is actually the exact opposite of the heavenly order. And here’s what’s important about this: the disciples wouldn’t necessarily have heard Jesus’ words as a ringing endorsement of the value of childhood, but as evidence that God exercises a preferential option for those the disciples might consider unworthy of much of anything; those the disciples would have written off; those the disciples would have considered as nothings and nobodies. The parable of the lost sheep further illustrates the point: it would be reasonable, having lost a sheep, for the shepherd to say, “Ah! But the overwhelming majority are here. Little has been lost. All remains well.” But for Jesus, that “little” is incredibly important…in fact, he doesn’t see it as “little” at all, but as tremendously and wondrously lovable; as worth, in fact, giving all that he is—the fullness of his humanity and fullness of his divinity—that none might be lost and that all might understand themselves as on the inside of God’s grace.

This is great news! It’s part of what Fr James Alison describes as the surpassing “joy of being wrong”—it’s great news that we’re wrong about what’s really worthy, because so often our notion of worthiness belittles and injures and writes-off and dis-counts and destroys other people! It’s great news that God’s love (compared to our notion of what love ought to be) is completely unreasonable, risking everything for the rejected, the outcast, the “least” and the lost!

And this great news, Beloved Friend, is also a challenge—because part of the call to follow Christ is to seek the grace to do what Christ has done and will continue to do: to risk everything for love, to pour ourselves out for love, to take our part in the overturning of the order of the world for the sake of love. This means not only allowing grace to radically readjust in and for us what it is we think is worthy of regard, but to also understand ourselves as lost until we can manage to let ourselves be found by Love.

Beloved, let us pray today for the grace to be given to the searching love of God, and to be transformed into a people for whom what matters to God matters also to us!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+