There may be nothing so boring as speaking about your grandchildren, but I’m going to!
When our first grandchild Isabella known to us as ‘Bella the beautiful’ celebrated her first birthday guess what she got from her mum and dad. Well, it seemed a bit strange to me but they gave her a pram! A bit young for that isn’t it, I thought, well I think really it’s a baby walker disguised as a pram!
However, there is a serious side to this because, from the very earliest age, Bella is learning how to be an adult using toys. A child sees the world and comes to terms with all its complexities by using anything they can lay their hands on to make their own little world and reimagine ours. They have so much to teach us about the world of Jesus because that’s what he was doing in his parables of the ‘The kingdom of Heaven’
My own little world
Child psychologists tell us that play is an essential part of a child’s development, not just an idle amusement because play enables the child to imagine, explore, and experiment with the world around them. Do you remember the thrill of your first train set or your first doll’s house? How real that world was, how excited you were to create your own little version of the world around you. A child can use anything, a dustbin can become a spaceship, a cardboard box, or a sailing boat, it just doesn’t matter because the child can see the endless possibilities in every object they find.
Reimagining the world
Jesus, then, asks us to enter into the mind of a child, to become like a child able to imagine the world as we would like it to be. ‘The Kingdom of heaven’ is the world that Jesus imagined, a world in which we would live in peace and harmony with each other, not an Edenic paradise, but a real world where we fail and fall short, but are forgiven. A world where love replaces law, and service replaces slavery. This was the kind of world imagined by the artist Henri Rousseau. His Jungle paintings, inspired by children’s picture books take us into ‘The Kingdom of heaven’ as he imagined it. It is a world without humans, maybe because he thought the world would be better off without us, but it is not a world without suffering. ‘Nature raw in tooth and claw’ is how he saw it, but innocent of the conventions and culture of the world he knew.
As an artist, Rousseau himself was innocent of the conventions and culture of the established art world. As a self-taught artist who began painting at the age of 49, he stood outside the art world, but no one less than Picasso, who discovered one of his paintings at a street market recognised Rousseau’s genius and went to meet him. In 1908 Picasso held a half-serious banquet in his studio in Rousseau’s honour attended by eminent poets, painters, and writers of the period. Although never celebrated by the art establishment he is credited with inspiring many other artist movements that broke with convention, among them ‘Surrealism’ and ‘Fauves’.
The world of Jesus
Jesus was and is a child at heart. His teaching was always with stories and often with objects that were to hand. A seed, a flower, a handful of sand, and always with the words: “This is what the kingdom of heaven is like”. He invites us to enter his world and become like a child again, imagining with him what the world could be like. Today he invites us to welcome into our lives the child that is in us, for to welcome that child is to welcome him, and to welcome him is to welcome the God who can reshape our imagination and our lives.
“Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me” Mark 9: 37.
The world of power
So we are urged to become endlessly creative, not just like a child but like God. How sad that today children are pushed into the harsh adult world of competition and testing so early that they lose the opportunity to play. It was this adult world that stunted the imaginations of the disciples and led them to argue about who would be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. It was this adult world that focused on control rather than compassion, power rather than play, and ideology rather than imagination. This was the game the religious leaders of the day wanted to play. They refused to imagine a world where they were not in control or to play with the possibility of a different world where peace, justice, delight, and compassion might shape their lives.
The wisdom of the child
James calls this ‘child’s play’, Wisdom. It comes from the humility that recognises that submission to God is the fertile soil where the fruit of the Spirit can grow: ‘Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness’ James 3:18. To submit to God is to imagine another world where negative feelings are replaced by positive thoughts and a new future for the church and the world becomes not just ‘child’s play’ but reality.