Let the Children Be Free
Sixth Sunday After Pentecost
When I was a teenager, I remember my father going to the state legislature to lobby against a bill that had been introduced that session. The proposed law would have threatened something my father held dear, a reality he thought was critical for social wellbeing as well as something upon which his work depended: summer. Summer for him was not the season, so much, but the enjoyment of a few months in which children could collectively be free of institutional obligation. The legislature was pushing for more days in the school year, shortening and breaking up any time away from school. My father was a camp director, and so keeping summer free was important for his work putting on summer programs. But more than that, my father also very much believed in summer and the time for recreation it provided. He thought it was good for children to have time free of homework and days organized around hourly bells.
This belief in time off was something that extended, for my father, beyond just a season. When I was halfway through first grade, my parents removed me from school and homeschooled me instead. That act was the culmination of a long fight they had with the school’s principal and board. The issue then was recess—the school had eliminated it and only allowed a short, structured play time. The rest of the day was about drilling students in what was a precursor to today’s world of the testing industrial complex. I had been stuck in a windowless classroom and crammed into a desk where I’d been reprimanded for humming while I worked. My parents believed it was inhumane to keep children from playing for so long and they could see my curiosity and creativity faltering as a result. I didn’t return to formal schooling until high school.
First century Palestine did not have these problems, at least in the same form, but the underlying powers at play were present. They are expressions of a perennial human desire for control, for maximization, for what sociologist Hartmut Rosa has called our desire to increase our “share of the world.” Our Gospel reading for this Sunday finds Jesus confronting those powers, and offering instead a childlike stance of curiosity, openness, and joy—a stance not about possession but participation.
The selection from the lectionary is a bit muddled, skipping from one passage to the next, but at its heart is the fact that those who were in power, whether in religion or government, were more focused on their own games than joyfully joining the new reality that God is bringing into the world through Jesus. So it was that rather than be curious about John and Jesus, they stood outside the circle with their minds already ossified in their opinions.
In Jesus comparing them to children, I think of Augustine’s reflections in The Confessions in which he noted that while his schoolmasters beat young Augustine and his classmates for playing games, their own learned curriculum was just as fanciful. Augustine’s own pedagogy reflected a more expansive, curious approach than that of the pedants who schooled him in his early days. In this way he reflects something of Jesus’s own approach.
What Jesus is inviting his disciples into is an open, childlike wonder about who he is and what God is doing though his life and ministry. Jesus invites them to exit the burdensome world of the Empire with its institutions of religious control. Instead, he invites them to enter into the easy way of his own life, a way that reflects the patterns of grace and delight that are at the heart of the world’s sabbath. As Warren Carter comments in Matthew and the Margins, the peace that Jesus promises is not “peace of mind” but the rest that “cannot happen under imperial domination.” This rest is a reality of new creation that is breaking into the world.
In our day, rest and its companions, play and delight, continue to be threatened by the institutions of control. Schools, all too often, are not places of wonder and exploration so much as training grounds for participation in the economy of Empire. And though there are valiant teachers and administrators working against this reality, their own weariness reflects the burden that ripples throughout our society. Children now are not just playing in imitation of adult realities but are captive to the same pressures as many adults. All of us have our lives occupied, not so much by centurions, as by screens and all the products of the attention economy that they open onto. It is no wonder that we are ever more anxious, distracted, unsettled.
It is into this reality that Jesus still comes, inviting us to let go, to wander the fields and forests, exploring the given world in the liberating harness of grace. It is a reality whose path requires discipline. Like all good play, there is serious work involved, but it is work that leaves us refreshed, renewed, and most importantly, more fully human at the end. With Jesus our attention is not occupied, but rather opened onto the world of wonder and awe that is God’s reign.
The invitation to the easy yoke, the call to be like children (and even for children to be like children) is a great call to freedom. One that is fuller and more colorful than the blank canvas of the American ideal of mere freedom from constraint celebrated on the 4th of July holiday. It is this call that we would do well to heed this summer, living into the abundant life of creation, and breaking away from the busy, frantic pace of life of the Empire. Come, rest, join the work of grace—that is the invitation our Gospel extends to us.
