“Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”
Matthew 18:4
All my life I have heard Christians talk about how we need to have a childlike faith.
Typically, when they make such a reference, it is associated with the passage in Mark 10:13-16. In that story, people are bringing little children to Jesus, and the disciples try to shoo them away. Jesus is disturbed by their rejection of the children and commands the disciples to bring the children to Him.
It is at that point that Jesus said the oft-quoted words, “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” Well-meaning teachers regularly use this passage to argue that Christian’s need to have a naive faith, a simple faith, an unquestioning faith.
Matthew 18:4, however, shows Jesus praising a different characteristic of “childlike” faith. He praises the children’s humility.
Whenever I am discussing this idea, I think of Aladdin at the beginning of the Disney movie. One of the guards chasing Aladdin calls him a “street rat.” We live in a time in the United States where orphaned children don’t roam the streets. The one or two children most families have are doted on. They are all little princes and princesses in their parents’ eyes and in our culture’s eyes.
We don’t think of children as street rats. We do not think of them as the humblest rung of humanity.
Much of the biblical narrative is about the tension between pride and humility. In Jesus’ Gospel, it isn’t the wealthy and powerful who receive reward; it is the humble–Lazarus the beggar, the Samaritan, and the child.
A Quote to Consider
“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character–that is the goal of true education.”
-Martin Luther King Jr.
As a professor, I often lament that we have made college all about the financial reward. We tell students they should go to college so they can make more money. Financial gurus call majors that don’t, on average, yield high financial returns “useless degrees.”
But learning to make money is not education in its most meaningful sense. Yes, we all need to earn a living. But education should be about living a more meaningful life.
We need to think intensively and critically. Those skills will serve us well in matters of faith and as citizens. It is a skill set that better enables us to apprehend truth. It is also a skill set that helps us to build character.
Graduate students and professors are notorious for experiencing “impostor syndrome.” We are supposed to be experts in our fields. Often, we should know more about our specialty than all but a handful of other specialists. Yet in learning everything we do, we also understand how much we don’t know. That is humbling.
Some scholars, and even undergraduate students, get puffed up by what we know. We become prideful. But we really should become like the child, humble, realizing how much we don’t know.
One of the best ways that education can build character is by teaching us how much there is still to learn. Education is less about the facts we do know and more about being able to intensively and critically engage with all that we do not know.
Prayer
Lord,
Teach us the humility of a child. Keep us from pride in what we know, and give us wisdom to recognize how much we still have to learn.
Amen
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