Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another about who was the greatest. He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” (Mk 9.33–37)
It was a typical night at a restaurant with my family. I was in college and we were on vacation together in Florida. It just so happened that a couple from my parents’ past were coincidentally in the same place at the same time, and so we decided to all eat together.
My sisters and I were at one end and the four adults at the other. And as soon as we sat down, the husband from the couple reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and laid it on the table. He tinkered with it, propping it up and laying it back down until he got it just right, and then he joined back in the conversation with my parents and his wife.
And the wallet sat in that exact spot throughout the entire meal. I was working up the courage to ask the man if he had a back problem and thus he couldn’t sit on his wallet, but before I had a chance to say anything, he said, “I notice you’ve noticed my wallet.” Indeed I had. It was a large leather billfold with all these Ls and Vs on it (I later learned it was Louis Vuitton, a very expensive brand). And when I explained that, yes, it had piqued my curiosity, he said, “I lay it out so the waitress knows I’m wealthy. Because if she’s knows I’m wealthy she’ll be quicker with the service and more polite.”
Dave Zahl starts one of the chapters in The Big Relief with an observation about the observations he made in a given week about how we, and others, signify status.
Dollars, zip codes, party invitations, advanced degrees, body mass index, golf handicaps, busyness, hair color, engine horsepower, house cleanliness, soccer trophies, knowledge of current events, number of bedrooms, number of tattoos, number of children, number of likes, biceps size, audience size, church size, waist size, literary tastes, cuisine tastes, movie tastes, mileage run per week, passport stamps, and clothing brands.
Whether or not we know it, though most of the time we do know it, we are all caught up in a time of deep status consciousness. To quote Zahl, “We are extraordinarily imaginative creatures when it comes to symbolizing and signaling worth and value.”
And sometimes we don’t even notice how much our mattering matters. When we ask questions like, “Where did you go to school?” or “Where do you live?” or “Where did you go on vacation?” we’re also asking, “Are you above or below me?” So much of our lives have been turned into a game in which there are winners and there are losers.
Hence the long standing joke among clergy: How do you find out if your pastor went to Duke? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.
There’s a lingering worry lurking underneath everything all the time about who we are, and in particular who we are in relation to everyone else. There’s a constant pressure to be somebody, to be someone of note, somebody worth taking seriously.
During the time of Shakespeare, the Globe Theater was one of the most popular places to visit and therefore one of the most lucrative. You could pay for a particular spot among the balconies, or you could pay a penny to stand in the yard. But the most expensive seats were actually the worst seats. They were above and behind the stage. From that vantage point you could neither see nor hear the plays penned by Shakespeare.
But that wasn’t the point. The wealthy weren’t paying to see the show, they were paying to be seen.
The same used to be true of church pews.
This is a copy of the pew rental chart for First Methodist Church in Evanston, Illinois, in 1911. The best seats went for $200 and the cheap seats sold for $25.
The most expensive pews are toward the front, and the cheapest are toward the back. Of course, it pays to be close to the action up here by the altar, but a lot of it has to do with the fact that if you sat toward the front, you were paying for the privilege to be seen.
Achievement culture, or status culture, is very real and it has devastating effects. It’s at the root of many mental health challenges that many of us struggle with on a regular basis. And even those among us who have somehow been blessed to avoid the allure of normative status markers like the best school and the biggest homes and the largest salaries, we still want to matter. We are just interested in different matters of mattering.
And no matter where we find our mattering, it’s often linked with something we possess. And yet, even if we achieve the possessions we think will give us meaning and purpose, we never really satisfied.
To quote U2: I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.
Ask anyone who has had any success in any field, business owners, movie stars, writers, pastors, bankers, teachers … They might accumulate what they set out for, whether its money or influence or power or legacy, but they are on a treadmill that they can’t get off of. There’s always more market share, better films, the next book, fuller churches, more money, and better grades.
This is Zahl again: “Hanging our self-worth on the hook of achieving puts enormous pressure on us to establish, cultivate, and assert our somebodyness.” The apostle Paul puts it this way, “No one will be justified by the works of the law, for if righteousness came through the law then Christ died for nothing.”
And herein lies one of the most churchy words of all time: imputation. Jesus and the disciples are on the other side of the Mount of Transfiguration, having seen and heard strange sights and even stranger sounds as the cross now grows clearer on the horizon. The cross, incidentally, that Jesus has just commanded his disciples to take up if they are to follow him. Nevertheless, they come down from the mountain and Jesus asks his friends, “What were you all talking about on the road?” For once, Peter says not a mumbling word. In fact, none of them actually respond to Jesus’ question because, scripture says, they were engaged in an argument as a result of status anxiety.
They were fighting about who is the greatest.
Jesus responds to their silence, which is its own admission, by saying, “Listen, whoever want to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” And, taking a child in his arms, Jesus says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”
In Matthew’s version of this same story, the disciples don’t bicker among themselves but in fact they say the silent part out loud, “Which of us is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” Notice the present tense. And Jesus takes a kid and says, “Truly I say to you, unless you change and become like kids, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
There are plenty of difficult commandments in the scriptures, in both the Old and New Testaments. Give 10% of your income to the Lord, turn the other cheek, pray for your enemies, don’t lie, don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, and don’t even think about committing adultery, just to name a few. But this command of Jesus’ might very well be the most difficult. We can’t make ourselves kids any more than we can hop in a DeLorean with Doc Brown.
Despite our culture’s obsession with youth and children, there’s more to Jesus’ commandment than a willingness to be silly every once and a while. Whether it’s become like a kid or show hospitality to a kid, it’s an act of condescension. We’ve got to put our status on the status of someone below us.
Macrina the Younger was the sister of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, two ancient church fathers. And she gained her own notoriety because of her willingness to take this command of Jesus seriously. At all times, but especially during famine or plague, Roman custom permitted parents to abandon their unwanted infants, most often girls, in dumps — like literal dumps with trash. And Macrina regularly walked through the dumps, rescuing forsaken children and then raising them as her own.
The Didache, a first-century manual for ordinary Christians likewise commanded Christians to live as Christ, which is to say to live like Macrina who, like Christ, condescended to the status of those who had no status and, in so doing, elevated their status.
At the time of the Gospels, children did not represent sweetness, or cuteness, or even innocence. No, they were the very bottom of the social and economic systems. In fact, they were understood as property, to be dealt with however their owners (parents) felt, until they were old enough to produce for the family. Children were actually lower than slaves, and were disposable in a way that slaves weren’t.
You see, when Jesus says welcome kids or be like kids, it’s not a command to goofiness. No, Christ is commanding us to recognize that we’re no better than those who we deem at the bottom. Which, in the end, is good news because Jesus does his best work down at the bottom.
In other words, Jesus is in the business of imputation.
Paul Zahl defines imputation like this, “It is to ascribe qualities to someone that are not there intrinsically, to regard somebody as a person that he or she is not.” To put it scripturally, God reconciles and saves sinners by declaring us to be righteous not on account of anything we do or don’t, but instead on account of the righteousness of Christ. Whenever we receive love that we do not deserve, when we are shown favor in the middle of messing up, we witness the work of imputation. Imputation, to quote David Zahl again, is the how of grace.
When Jesus commands the disciples to be like children, he’s telling us to recognize how much we’re like children no matter how old we actually are. Because the truth, the inconvenient truth, is that we don’t have it all together. Most of us are just barely scraping by and we need all the help we can get.
If our standing in the world is based solely on what we can do and achieve, then the status anxiety will always remain as an anxiety. But if our standing in the kingdom of God is based on what God can do, then we’ve been set free from the shackles that bind you and me.
Have you ever noticed that children don’t actually show up all that much in the Bible? We like to parade out certain stories like little David with his sling, or Samuel sleeping in the Temple, or Jesus getting some very strange gifts on the occasion of his birth. But, by and large, the strange new world of the Bible is about adults.
And yet, one of the few children to appear in Mark’s gospel shows up near the end.
Jesus is arrested in the garden and the disciples flee in every direction. Peter finds himself under the cover of a cloak, huddling around a late night charcoal fire when a little girl says, “Hey, you’re one of Jesus’ disciples.” Peter denies the connection for the third time and the rooster crows in the distance. It’s at this precise moment, that the truth of what Peter has done hits him right in the heart and, as Mark puts it, “Peter breaks down and weeps.” Like a child.
But this, of course, isn’t the end of the story … Later, by the sea shore, Jesus returns to the very one who had denied him and abandoned him. By showing up for Peter over a shared meal, Christ imputes validity, purpose, value, and forgiveness to the one who needs it.
In the same way, Christ shows up in this meal for us, with us, beside us, and ultimately in us. Jesus imputes a righteousness we could never achieve on our own, Jesus elevates us from the bottom to the very top, and Jesus relieves us from having to do it all because he’s already done it all for us.
