There is a force in our human nature both to reverence and protect innocence, yet at the same time to suspect and exploit it. It is based in our own longings for innocence and our disappointments in having lost or disturbed our own.
We hear in today’s First Reading (Wisdom 2:12, 17-20) just such a picture of the hatred that can arise when innocence threatens judgment against the violent. The reading is a simple review of human history. Individuals or groups who have tried to live and work for holiness, peace, and justice are a public insult to those whose interests are opposite.
Who is this “just one” in today’s reading, who trusts in God? Of course, we know that “just one” is Jesus. But that “just one” can be seen in many others, both in our own times and in past centuries: Sir Thomas More, Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, Jean Donavan, Ita Ford and companions, Andre Kim Taegon, Oscar Romero, St. John Paul II; and the list goes backwards and forwards in time. Innocence is a brilliant light to those who live in the darkness of violent indulgence and a soft comforting glow to those whose simplicity is gently lived.
The Gospel for today (Mark 9:30-37) continues the theme that was begun last Sunday. Jesus tells his friends what will happen because He persists in living His all-encompassing truth. By teaching and healing and simply being, He insults those for whom self-importance is absolutely absolute. Jesus knows the ways of this world and speaks to his friends in words they do not yet understand. Instead, after hearing what Jesus says about His coming suffering and death, they indulge in a group discussion on the topic of their own personal importance. Sound familiar? Jesus asks them to reverse the course of their discussion by telling them that the most important person is the one who serves all others. He takes a little child in His arms and says, “whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me: and whoever receives me, receives not me, but the One who sent me.”
Do no harm. The first pledge a medical doctor makes is to “do no harm” and thereby attempt to heal. Jesus’ innocence is His divine love, that not only forgives, but also desires to continue and bring to healing the entirety of God’s creation. Most of us remember how we lost our innocence. Perhaps we have a personal history of doing harm to ourselves, to others, to creation and to God’s kingdom of love. It is embarrassing for us to recall how our words and actions have harmed others for our own benefit. Perhaps we lost our innocence by being harmed by someone else. Our pictures of who we are has been scratched, or has been dented, or has been damaged by the acids applied to them by the words and gestures of others. Losing our innocence, whether actively or passively, always involves some form of sin. It is God’s Will that we, ever so slowly, feel, appreciate and then appropriate the loving gaze God’s loving eyes and return to him.
Jesus takes the little child in His arms as a revelatory gesture of how each of us is invited by Him, to welcome ourselves, to embrace ourselves, because He does. We have injured and we have been injured, but we are missioned by each sacramental encounter we have with Jesus, from Baptism through the Healing of the Sick, to be welcomed and to be welcoming to others, because we continue to allow Jesus to do the same with us.
When Jesus answers the question about which one is the most important, He replied that the most important will be the last of all and the servant of all. If we are last because of having been harmed and remain injured by our choices or fears, then we are not last, but lost. It is in allowing ourselves to be healed that we will serve Christ’s healing touch in the scratched, etched and dented lives of others.
Who is the most important? Each of us is if we allow our injuries to be most properly healed by Jesus, as our lives are properly presented back to us. In Jesus, we regain our innocence, no matter how we lost it or how it was taken from us.
May God Bless You and Grant You His Peace!