I wrote this short piece for the Salisbury Diocesan Board of Education’s newsletter. I am sorry that it comes to you a few days after the end of the Epiphany season, but my laptop was stolen before I could upload it.
Adoration of the Magi by El Greco (1568), Museo Soumaya, Mexico City.
Until Candlemas on 2 February, we are in the season of Epiphany, one of the neglected parts of the Church’s year.
At the Epiphany, the Wise Men bowed down and worshiped the infant Christ as divine while he was still in the manger. What is particularly significant about this is that the Wise Men were not Jewish: central to Christ’s mission was that He was to manifest God’s love for the whole human race as His children, and not just one ethnic or religious group. At Epiphany, we see Christ already fulfilling this aspect of His mission in infancy.
We tend not to think of Christian children as agents of Christian mission, but rather more as recipients of teaching and formation. There are good reasons why we hesitate about the idea – adults sometimes manipulate the natural enthusiasm and innocence of the young; also, many missional tasks are also inappropriate for the very young to engage in until they have reached a greater degree of emotional maturity and interpersonal sensitivity.
Yet, set alongside our heavenly Father, we are little children. We are all inadequate to the truth and goodness of God in all its fullness.
At a time when even in Church schools, children from Christian homes are in a small minority, every Christian child in this country today grows up learning how to live in a secularised, multi-faith, society. So that they can live well in such a society throughout their lives, it is good that we teach our children how to explain their faith and why it matters to them in a way that is full of kindness and gentleness and sensitive to the differences of others. As is so often the case, we might find we have as much to learn from them as to teach them.
Children are not the Church of tomorrow; they are the Church of today, in the pattern of Christ, who even in his cot was already saving the world at that first Epiphany.
This is so true and as always beautifully expressed.
Thank you.