What associations
come into your mind when you think about children? Cute?
Charming? A breath of fresh
air? Noisy rascals? Precious?
Hard work? Our future? How about: poor. In the US today, 22% of children live in poverty. That’s as compared with 14% of adults. Statistically, children are more likely to be
poor. Globally, the pattern is the same.
Statistically, children are more likely to be hungry. The effects of poverty and malnutrition take
their toll more rapidly and more viciously on those not yet fully grown. In societies where most children don’t last
till adulthood, which was the case in Jesus’ world and is the case in far too
much of ours: they are undervalued, viewed as expendable. Today’s abortion crisis is not new: in the
Ancient world, all children were seem as discardable.
Jesus
the Lord identifies himself with a child. It’s a scandalous statement for him to make!
The
disciples seem to have fallen into a common trap among people who have done
good things, as they undoubtedly had.
They had followed Jesus, they had given up plenty to be with him, some
of them had gone around preaching with no provisions for the journey. But they were yet to give up their egos. They wanted to boast about how great a
disciple they were. To be a disciple is
to follow Jesus: to receive him, to be with him, then to go out and proclaim
the Good News of salvation to be found in him, to proclaim that in a particular
way to the most vulnerable. Because, in receiving
the most vulnerable, we receive Christ.
God made vulnerable, made woundable, in flesh. God, present to us still, in the
vulnerable. “You want to be a great
disciple?” You can hear Jesus ask, “to
be great at being close to me? Then don’t
boast, but come near, be close to me, be close to the vulnerable.”
We
know about St. Jerome’s great intellect, his great facility with
languages. He’s in my daily litany of
saints whose intercession I ask for.
And, I’ll be honest, I started asking him because I want some of his
greatness: I want his to be some of the shoulders I stand on in my pursuit of
academic excellence. And excellence is a
good thing to want. But, when I ask for
his prayers, I no longer picture him in his study, thanks to gospels like this
that call me out. He was called to rise
from his writing desk by Christ, Christ encountered in the refugees that came
to Bethlehem from Rome after the Visigoth sack, who he welcome and served in
his monastery until his death. He wrote,
“I cannot help them all, but I grieve and weep with them. And, completely given up to the duties which
charity imposes on me, I have put aside my commentary on Ezekiel and almost all
study. For today, we must translate the
words of Scripture into deeds.”
St.
Jerome, servant of the word and servant of the vulnerable, pray for us!
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