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I lived at our Madonna House in Washington DC for two years about a decade ago. As the house is located on Capitol Hill, it is not surprising that among our many friends there, are people with long careers working in and around the federal government.
One of these friends told me about a social custom in those circles. She called it “the DC handshake,” and simply, it is this: when you meet someone at a social event or official function, you shake his or her hand and make pleasant social chit-chat, but all the while your eyes are ceaselessly scanning the crowd behind and around him.
The purpose is obvious: you are on the lookout for someone more important, more high up, more influential than the person you are actually talking to at that moment.
Well, DC or not DC, any one of us can wince a little and recognize something of our own lower natures in that kind of handshake. Social hierarchy and the urge to mount up higher in it is not confined to the world of power politics and influence peddling. It is one of the hardy perennials of the human heart.
Mark 9: 33-37 gives Jesus’ answer to social ladder climbing and its value. The disciples are arguing on the road about which of them is the greatest. Interestingly, they were doing it out of Jesus’ earshot, as he has to ask them about it. And then they are ashamed to admit it.
After giving them the answer we are all familiar with if we know the Gospels at all (whoever among you wants to be great must be the least… a servant.(vs. 35), he does something even more remarkable.
He sets a child in front of him and tells them whoever receives one such child… welcomes me.
Now this is not the more familiar Gospel about becoming a child so as to receive the kingdom (Mark 10: 15, Matt 19: 14, Luke 18:17). This is about receiving the child, and so receiving Jesus. What does it mean to receive the child?
In the ancient world there was little sentimentality about children. Parents loved their own children, of course, but our modern sense of valuing children because they are children, of seeing a special virtue and worth in children themselves, was unknown.
Children were simply incomplete adults: weak, unschooled, insignificant save to those who cared for them personally.
Children were those who had no social, political, or physical power. Nothing to offer. There was no advantage to be had from being in relationship to them; on the contrary, they themselves had needs and imposed a burden of cost and care on those obligated towards them.
And these are the ones Jesus tells us we are to receive, to have a privileged care and concern for, to be on the watch for, to seek out, to welcome, to befriend.
Far from the “DC handshake,” we have here the “JC handshake,” if you will. Our eyes always on the watch, always scanning the crowd for the one who has nothing to offer us, the one who is the poorest and most ill favored in the place.
Our eyes always watchful on the one we are currently engaged with, the one whose hand we are currently shaking, not for what we can get out of this person, but for any sign of need in him, any way this person right now in front of me is “the child,” the one who has nothing to give me but his own need for my love and care.
The “JC handshake,” or if you prefer a more formal title for it, “the preferential option for the poor.” That’s what this Gospel is about, what receiving the child is about. Christ calls us to (and the Church has echoed his call) a constant concern to meet and aid the poor in our lives, in whatever form they come to us.
Now many hear that call and may think “OK, so fighting for social justice is where it’s at then!” Or perhaps we should all go work in a soup kitchen or a refugee camp or some such thing.
While that is all very good and worthwhile, and indeed we probably all should look at what our direct and personal service to the most desperate and afflicted people in our communities and in the world is, and while social justice concerns are certainly a core component of the Church’s moral teachings, there is more to it than that.
Receiving the child is a whole way of life, an entire ethos orientating every step of our path through life.
It really is a question of refusing to look at people to see what you can get out of them, and if you can’t get what you want from this one, to keep your eyes scanning the crowd for someone more valuable to you.
It is choosing to see people as children to be received, as the poor to be served, as a brother or sister standing before you with some level of need, even if this particular one before you is not starving in a refugee camp, at least not currently.
The disciples were fighting and squabbling about who is the greatest. Jesus answers that question by opening up for them the much bigger and more central question: what is greatness, anyhow?
And that is a question that goes unasked far too often, not only in DC or Ottawa or any other global power center you could name, but in our own hearts.
The gospel truth is that power is only to be acquired and used at the service of the child.
Power in whatever form it takes—political and social clout, intellectual or artistic gifts, physical or psychological strength—only has its proper form and function when it is used in some fashion for the poor in all their forms, to alleviate the suffering, address the need, and enrich the poverty of those who are without, in every and any sense of that word.
And human greatness lies nowhere else but in becoming that servant of humanity, in humble imitation of the Servant who laid down his life for us (v. 31).
This Sunday’s Gospel is so radical, and yet wrapped up in such simple language. Whoever welcomes a child in my name welcomes me.
So let’s shake hands with Jesus today, if you don’t mind my putting it that way. Let’s look into the eyes of each person we meet and see how we can receive them in their poverty, their childlike need for our love and care.
A reflection on Mark 9:30-37, the Gospel for the 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time
