As a Little Child (Luke 18:15-17)

As a Little Child

October 12, 2025

Luke 18:15-17

By: Pastor Mike Conner

***

What do we know about the children in this story? It’s a crucial question, because Jesus explicitly says that in order to enter God’s new creation and beloved community, we have to receive grace “as a little child” (Lk 18:17).

I’ve looked again and again at these three verses, and the only thing that I think we can say for certain about these kids is that “people were bringing [them] to [Jesus]” (Lk 18:15). The infants and the young children are carried to Jesus with purpose. They aren’t just carted along because their parents want to go see Jesus. They aren’t just tolerated, there in the crowds to be seen and not heard. For some community members in that region between Galilee and Samaria where Jesus is traveling, the children are the why, the point of the journey. They are brought to Jesus to be touched, to be blessed and prayed for. What we know about the children is that they were carried or cajoled to the one who loves them unconditionally. 

I wonder if Jesus is saying that each of us needs to be brought lovingly to him if we are to enter God’s work in the world. Each of us enters the kingdom of God, perhaps, when we humble ourselves to living an interdependent life, when we allow ourselves to lean on others, to be helped by others. Each of us is who we are and where we are, in large art, because of others -- ancestors, parents, mentors, teachers, friends, coaches, therapists, support groups, spiritual directors, pastors, even strangers.

There is no such thing as a lone wolf Christianity; having a pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality and a vibrant faith are incompatible. After all, the word for faith in the New Testament, pistis, literally means trust. Trust means depending on something bigger and stronger than yourself to carry you along. Trust is the foundation posture of following Jesus. 

Luke’s placement of this story in his Gospel is revealing. It exposes our resistance to mutuality. Right after Jesus has instructed the disciples to imitate a child’s comfort with being carried, a rich ruler appears on the scene to quiz Jesus about the qualifications for salvation and what he has to do to earn it (Lk 18:18-29). For all we know, Jesus could still have a child in his arms or bouncing on his knees! 

Jesus tells the rich man that he must keep the ten commandments. The ruler affirms that he’s kept then since his youth. Now, this is interesting. The ruler uses the word νεότης (neotēs), which means youth or boyhood. That’s a different word from those Luke uses to describe the children and infants being brought to Jesus. The ruler is referring to a later stage of human development, a time when he internalized a kind of personal scorekeeping. From the days of his boyhood when we could start doing things for himself, measuring his religiosity and monitoring his decisions, he’s cultivated an impeccable religiosity, and garnered wealth and leadership, too.

So, Jesus’ next move is to disarm the man, to test his willingness to humbly trust in others. “Sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me” (Lk 18:22, NLT). Give up your achievements, your security, your autonomy. Follow me. Trust me. Then you’ll have eternal life. Jesus is asking this ruler to let himself be carried. He’s inviting him back beyond the malformation of his boyhood into true childhood, into spiritual infancy:  “But,” Luke writes, “when the man heard this he became very sad, for he was very rich” (Lk 18:23, NLT). It can be painful, when we’re used to a life organized by merit and rules and accumulation, to be invited to empty ourselves so that we can carry and be carried.

We aren’t told what the rich ruler ultimately did with his sadness, but Jesus’ point about the children is strengthened by this contrast. To experience freedom, we must not trust in ourselves but in the community that carries us, because it’s from that place of availability and simplicity that Jesus’ can touch us. 

Physical touch was very often how Jesus healed people. In Luke’s Gospel alone, he touches lepers to cleanse them of leprosy (5:13); he touches a widow’s dead son in the village of Nain and raises him back to life (7:14); on the night of his betrayal and arrest, Jesus even touches the slave of the high priest in the garden of Gethsemane, healing his ear, which had been slashed off by a defensive disciple with a sword (22:51). Throughout his ministry, crowds of people constantly tried to touch him and experience his power (6:19). Famously, a woman who for twelve years had failed to find a cure for her chronic bleeding pressed through a crowd to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment (8:44-47). And when she did, she was instantly healed. 

Jesus wants to help us. Jesus wants to bless us.

Jesus wants to give us a second chance, a third chance, a thousandth chance. He wants to free us from addiction. He wants to give us boldness in the face of fear, compassion in the face of cruelty, abundance in the face of scarcity. He wants to bind us to a community, take hold of our time and our talents for his glory, and wipe away our shame.

But for any of this to happen, we have to be touched by his grace. We have to be available, reachable, open to receiving something that we cannot earn or wrestle from life for ourselves.

We have come to a place or spiritual poverty where we can, with either sadness or joy, it doesn’t really matter: “Jesus, I can’t do this on my own. I need to be carried. I need to be helped. I need your healing touch.” 

And here’s what’s mysterious and wonderful: When we pray that prayer of surrender, or another prayer like it, when we enter into a way of live with others where we get to carry and be carried, we commune with Jesus himself. We aren’t just obeying him when we lean on others, we are spending time with him. Let me explain. 

The first verse in this story references infants. “People were bringing even infants to him” (8:15, NRSV), Luke writes. That word in Greek is βρέφος. It’s different from the words Luke uses in verses 16 and 17, variations of the Greek παιδίον, which means young child. Brephos indicates a brand-new baby, sometimes even a baby still in the womb. No other Gospel writer uses this word anywhere in the story of Jesus. It’s unique to Luke.  

And do you know where it shows up elsewhere in Luke, in stories also unique to his Gospel? In the Christmas stories! John the Baptist and Jesus are each called a brephos. John is called an “infant” in the story of pregnant teenage Mary visiting pregnant elder Elizaeth. John “leaps” in Elizabeth’s womb at the sound of Mary’s greeting (Lk 1:41, 44). Jesus is called a brephos, a baby, in the story of his birth, when he is wrapped in cloths and laid in a manger. The angels tell the shepherds to look for this holy infant. 

Jesus himself -- the Son of God, the Lord of the cosmos, the one who forgives our sins and erases our shame and empowers us for works of mercy and justice -- he was once a dependent baby. He needed to be carried, first in the womb of Mary and later in her arms. He cried to be fed, to be changed, to be held. At eight days old, he was lifted up by Simeon in the temple and blessed. As a toddler he was carried by his father Joseph into Egypt so be saved from the violence of Herod. And as a thirty-year-old man, still living from that foundational posture of dependence, he entered the waters of the Jordan, allowed his cousin John to hold him and baptize him, and he received the proclamation from heaven of the Father’s love, and the anointing of the Holy Spirit as his source of power. 

He knew unconditional trust. It was his way in the world. And it’s the way that he calls us to as well. 

This is not a coincidental linguistic connection between the infant Christ and the children who, many years later, were then being brought to him for a blessing. Jesus is saying that we all get a little help somewhere along the way, and that, whether we are helping or being helped, serving or being served, carrying or being carried, we are in contact with him. He has united it all to his divinity and dignified it.

What a rebuke of our society that scorns those who ask for help. We’ve made it a shameful thing, needing to be carried from time to time. So those in power are cutting SNAP, cutting Medicaid, and sending soldiers into cities to abduct the most vulnerable. We expand national budget for bombs while forcing more and more people into poverty.

But what a rebuke also, sometimes, of the Church, of Christians! Remember, it was the disciples who spoke sternly to the parents bringing those babies to Jesus. We sometimes internalize that bootstraps mentality, that love for autonomy and insulation from the plight of others. Our love has limits. We’ll welcome, we’ll donate, but when it comes to carrying someone else, that’s too much! Or when it comes to needing to be carried, well, we could never ask for that! We don’t want to be a burden! 

But, my friends, if it was good enough for Jesus to carry and be carried, it ought to be good enough for us. And though it’s easier for us to think of being Christlike when we are helping others, it is also Christlike when we ask those around us, especially those in the Body of Christ, for help. 

At the very beginning of the human story, when God first formed Adam from the clay and filled his lungs with the breath of life, God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen 2:18, NLT).

Before anything was broken in creation, before deception and violence and shame ever entered the picture, there was still one moment when something wasn’t quite right. It was the moment when the first person was a solitary. So God put Adam to sleep -- a condition of utmost vulnerability. And God took a rib from him -- a sign of inherent incompleteness. And God took that rib and formed Eve from it -- the beginnings of an interdependent community of partners, helpers. Myth or not, it’s the Bible’s way of telling us that we are never meant to journey alone.

As we take some time to reflect on our own stories and who has carried us, may God break the hardness of our pride and give us the soft heart of humility.

May we become like the infants and those who brought them -- openhanded, either to be hefted up onto a hip, or available to reach for someone else.

Amen.