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A Theological Reflection on the Forum on Child Poverty in Ireland by Most Revd Dr Richard Clarke, Bishop of Meath and Kildare
It would seem sensible to begin any theological reflection on today?s events with familiar images from the gospels - of children being brought to Christ, of him blessing children and, of course, of him pointing to a child as the exemplar for membership of the Kingdom of God. A reasonable place, then, to begin a Christian theology of childhood, but with care.. With care, because these images from the gospels can too easily be sentimentalised, and too often have been sentimentalised. ?Jesus friend of little children? - yes, but not in the hackneyed schmaltzy way which would infantilise the Gospel itself.
We should therefore keep to the front of our minds the likelihood that the sentimentalising of childhood is a relatively new phenomenon, perhaps as recent as Charles Dickens onwards.. There is some reason for this. Until fairly recent times (even in so-called ?developed? societies), it could never have been assumed that any particular child would even reach adulthood. In less complex rural societies, child mortality was probably lower across the board than it was to become in the disease, epidemics and infections of more recent centuries, but we need to remember that in differing societies in Europe and America, it was the second half of the nineteenth century which saw a real decline in child mortality. And certainly, if you read Victorian diaries and letters, you will see the death of a child noted as a matter of real sadness, but not necessarily of any great surprise.
It is not, of course, that in earlier periods of history people did not love their own children but, in the generality, children were clearly the most vulnerable of humankind and hence almost an expendable and non-essential sector of their society. The child was an adult-in-waiting (if lucky enough to get there); in the meantime he or she was not very important. Can we say that it is much different today in many places, here or in other countries?
So, when Jesus pointed to children as an example of the principles for membership of the Kingdom of God, it was not a sentimental picture of wide-eyed innocence he was painting, it was the vulnerability, the expendability, the exploitability, perhaps even a refusal of the world to take with any real seriousness ?the child? at all, to which he was pointing. Christ?s association with the child was therefore on a par with his essential connectedness with the despised, the rejected, and the abused (in every sense of that final word).
Just over two weeks ago - the Sunday before Advent - the gospel reading was from that famous passage in Matthew?s Gospel, Chapter 25, a parable of the judgement, of sheep and goats at the throne of God. What is made clear here is that Christ?s true identification is with the dispossessed, the vulnerable and the unloved. And this is ?identification?in two senses - It is where Christ is and who Christ is. It is where we will find Christ.
The German theologian Jürgen Moltmann gives us some very disturbing comment on all of this. Taking the early Christian dictum (of Ignatius of Antioch), ?Where Christ is, the Church is ? Ubi Christus, ibi ecclesia?, Moltmann points to this episode within Matthew?s Gospel which makes it clear that Christ is to be found among the most deprived of his brothers and sisters - In as much as we do good to the most neglected and degraded of his family, we do good to Christ himself. So, argues Moltmann, this is where the Church in its fullest reality is ? where Christ is - even if the institutional Church does not acknowledge or recognise it. The Church is, where the dispossessed and suffering are, and it is only completely authentic there..
Moltmann establishes what we might, I suppose, call a twin-track approach. The Church as the apostolate is the community gathered around the Word of God and the Sacraments. This tells us what the Church is. But if we wish to ask where the Church is to be found, we must look among the marginalised, the abandoned, the fearful and the afraid.
It follows that the Church does not carry charity out from itself to the abandoned child, and nor does it do good to the neglected child as an object, nor does it go out from the Church to places of darkness and hopelessness.. because this is where the Christ already is and therefore where the Church is in reality, as distinct from where it struts its stuff in the public gaze, and in the hope of attracting public admiration. Christ in the Church is those whom the world has abandoned. If we want to meet Christ in his Church, this is where he already is. And there is nothing sentimental or unctuous about that. There is instead an imperative to find ourselves where we would find Christ..
One of my heroes from the previous generation of theologians is an American layman - a radical human rights lawyer, a prophetic firebrand (and an Anglican, if that doesn?t sound like a contradiction in terms) - William Stringfellow. He wrote vehemently that there is something dreadfully dangerous in the well-intentioned doctrine that the content and relationships of religion are somehow different from the content and relationships of secular life, and that we therefore have to apply the propositions of our religion to the world around, so as to make them relevant to that world. This he sees as a denial of the Incarnation, because in Jesus Christ, there is no chasm between God and the world. Christ does not need us to bring him into the world ? we are to find him where he already is. And so, Stringfellow says, the first place to look for Christ is in hell. And today we have heard a great deal about hell, and hence where we are to find Christ ? not bring him there but find him already there.
In a few weeks time, following Christmas, we will - if we get around to it amidst the distractions - hear within liturgy on 28 December the terrible story of the massacre of the innocents. It is the place where we might finish our thoughts today. Because this narrative calls us all to reflect again on the full extent of our amazing ability to rationalise our own behaviour and to blame others for all human wickedness. We rationalise our own behaviour, as we deceive ourselves into disclaiming responsibility for the suffering of all innocents, and by our refusal to seek Christ where he is, where his Church truly is, in the darkness and the abandonment. And so we do not merely ignore the teaching of Christ, we succeed in reversing it.
Brendan Kennelly, in that colourful set of poems, The Book of Judas, underscores the ways in which we all readily assume the role of Judas rather than of Christ. I leave you with one of these poems, where he speaks of our cherished role as concerned onlooker :
You didn?t set out with dagger and axe
After midnight stealing into towns and villages
To murder the sleeping children, nor did you hire
Hit-men to do the job while your averted gaze
Embraced the raped landscape of your childhood.
No, you stayed at home and, armchaired, read
The UNICEF Report. You were moved, moved,
And saving schemes bombarded your head.
Such schemes! Passionate as your youthful dreams!
Revolutionary, they came to nothing, how could
Such ardour fail to make one loaf of bread?
The children die, die, no screams
Split you or me, the innocent blood
Of slaughterers spits on the huge small dead.