Our weakest members: Reading Jesus' political message in our families

This piece is extracted from a sermon preached by Veronica Zundel at Wood Green on 13 May 2007. (Wood Green Mennonite Church is currently using Ched Myers' book Binding the Strong Man for a sermon series on Mark's gospel.)

Passage: Mark 9.30-10.16

Recently I was watching a programme in BBC-4's Edwardian season, called 'A pocketful of posies' in which very elderly people recalled their Edwardian childhood. There were two stories that stayed with me particularly.

One was a girl who, with her twin sister, was placed in an orphanage at about 5 because their father had died in the First World War and their mother couldn't support them. In the orphanage they were separated, and one day one sister was being inspected to see if her pinafore was clean. She kept asking to go to the toilet but the nurse wouldn't let her. Eventually the nurse found a spot on her pinafore, and took a hairbrush to spank her. As she spanked her, the girl found herself uncontrollably pooing, as she put it. The nurse was so furious that she rubbed the girl's face in the poo, and then took her next door to show her sister, who was horrified. It's hard to imagine such cruelty.

The other story was about a boy who was illegitimate, and whose mother never showed him any love. He started attending the Salvation Army, where they had a penitent's bench for people to come and repent of their sins. Because he felt so ashamed of being what was then called a bastard, he went and put his head down on the bench. And an officer came up and gently lifted him up, saying 'You're too young to have any sins.'

I tell these two stories because they illustrate two very different attitudes to children, and at the heart of our passage for today is the child, and what the child represents for Jesus.

It's difficult for us in this society to understand the shock that it would be in 1st century Palestine for Jesus to take a child in his arms and hold it before the disciples as the touchstone of their discipleship. I first heard Jim Punton point out what Ched Myers points out here: that the child in the ancient Mediterranean world was the very bottom of the scale in terms of status and rights.

It wasn't 'Women and children first' for them, but 'women and children last'. Children were not even 'seen and not heard', they were neither seen nor heard. Perhaps this is why we hear nothing in the Gospels about Jesus' life between his birth and his attaining of adult status at twelve. It simply wouldn't have been considered of interest.

Myers demonstrates that the section of chapters 9-10 which we're studying today has a sort of double frame around it. The first frame is the idea of first becoming last and last first, introduced in 9.35 and recapitulated in 10:31. The second frame is the theme of children, which is at both ends of the passage and in its midst, and which for Myers is 'the primary example' of the first/last reversal.

In putting the socially insignificant child at the centre of his teaching, Jesus is making his political project personal, bringing it right into the private sphere of the home. Myers puts it this way: 'The follower of Jesus must expect the fate of a subversive, but the ultimate choice of the cross must also be daily reproduced in the concrete life of the messianic community'.

How we treat those who are vulnerable and dependent on us is the measure of how far we are welcoming and following Jesus, just as much as how we resist the values of the powers. I wonder whether Jesus would have been in favour of the Christian's right to corporally punish their children?

In Jesus' world children are at the margins of society, and repeatedly in this passage he is placing them at the centre. The new society of the kingdom, then is one in which the most unheard, the most ignored, the most ordered about, are to be put at the very heart of our lives: in which the weakest members are those we are to honour most.

Redemption is happening both when a parent chooses to talk to their child rather than hit them, when the local authority sets up a children's centre with parenting support classes, and when the Chancellor introduces child tax credit. We all know the saying that a society is measured by how it treats its weakest members; this passage tells us that a family or a marriage, or indeed a church, is measured in the same way.

*Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1988)