In this essay,

•  THE PHENOMENON OF THE CHILD

•  THE KIND OF LOVE THAT IS THE LOVE OF PARENT FOR CHILD

•  A BIBLICAL PORTRAIT

•  COGNIZANT CHILDREN (WHO REMOVE THE BLINDFOLD OF APPEARANCES) 

•  A FAMILY BEFORE CHRIST & THE FAMILY OF GOD 

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1 | The phenomenon of the child

It is surely correct to say that in every culture children are beloved. They are the most irrepressibly loved beings in the world. That this beloved quality can be ignored (by parents who succumb to their enslaving habits and become cold, exploitative, cruel, etc.) does not deny its reality. The child arrives with his or her own unequalled qualities: ‘my child’, ‘no one else in the world …’, ‘miraculous’.

My wooden language hardly does these three qualities justice, nor do I think I can make up the deficiency by trying harder. The child is one of the surpassing phenomena of life.

The first of the three qualities is the undeniability of the connection with yourself, as a parent. To call this the ‘property’ aspect likens it to something lesser ‒ property, things owned ‒ and for that very reason this way of talking will not serve. ‘My child’ is mine, in that sense, but is also (speaking of natural children) from me (that is, us: me united to the half who completes me, the ‘me’ of the union of marriage), caused by me, given to me.

‘No one else in the world …’. The second aspect of the phenomenon of the child is the child’s absolute uniqueness. No one else is this child, this ‘dear boy’, a fact brought home to you by the child’s very presence at the very moment of his arrival, but that you then begin the process of learning more deeply week by week, year by year. When the child is twenty you are still seeing this.

‘Miraculous’. I am not hampered here by the usual trouble with the discussion of miracles, the factor of abstraction or definition (what do you mean by a miracle?) because I am beginning with the particular reality: it isn’t the concept that concerns me but the child. So I don’t mean to say that the child is an example of the miraculous; the child is the reality I am speaking of and bears this quality that we call miraculous, …  extraordinary, … radiant, … perfect, … divine. All of these words attempt to name what the child’s existence presents. They are names for an invisible reality that is evident in the existence of the child. And, again, it can be seen in the child even much later. It is unaffected by all the imperfect behaviour you are forced, as a parent, to comment on. – It is one of the truly sad effects of human imperfection that you cannot find ways to communicate this real perception that you have, of your child, to your child.

It is obvious when I talk about the first of these qualities, ‘My child’, that this is a relational quality. Another person does not have this actual experience of relation, which is a real experience; relation generates an actual quality. People who are in the habit of downgrading relative things by comparison with objective things (experience ‘there for everybody’) are handicapped by a modern emphasis on uniformity, which you see in Kant, in liberalism, in conformist societies like Rousseau’s “perfect” democracy (in which the citizens force the individual “to be free,” like them). It is good to be aware of unique gifts and powers given to you. It may be only the parents who are able to look at the child and say, ‘No one else in the world …’, taking in this actual quality.

As for the other qualities, it is not only the parents who can look at a child and say, ‘Miraculous’. When a child is adopted this can happen, … but it makes some sense to say that, in the case of adoption, you have people not just taking on the role of parents but truly becoming parents, simply in a non-natural way. That is, there are experiences that become available to people and relations that become theirs on account of the kind of involvement with the world that they open themselves to.

This relative aspect of these three qualities is present also in God’s connection with man: with men and women, who are all God’s creatures ‒ who are, to be more precise “God’s children”.

“See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are,.… We are God’s children now,….”

1 John 3:1–2 ESV

Take note that the issue in this passage from the first letter of John is, literally, the “kind of love” given to man, by God, by “the Father”. The kind of love the Father gives to one He calls

“my darling child”.

Jeremiah 31:20 ESV

2 | The kind of love that is the love of parent for child

The kind of love that is “given to us”, John explains here, is the love of the parent for his own child. It is that kind of love that the child draws out of the father or mother; the irresistible love that the parent cannot resist giving.

In this passage there is no trace of those theological tales of the sort that … ‘God the Father, in his infinite superiority, sees us as worms and, in His kindness, just sets aside what we are (loathsome creatures, deserving death), choosing instead to treat us as His children’. If “we are God’s children”, is this something we are or a foreign, unwarranted status that God has granted us? To be a child (which is a relational thing: a child is always someone’s child) is not to play a role, which you might assume or drop; it is a matter of being, of what you inescapably are.

Some might feel pressed, by Christian habits, to work in the word ‘merit’ here:

‘Are you suggesting that the human child merits God’s love?’

But surely, if this is what we are thinking, confusion is seeping in. It is the wrong term for the relation of parent and child.

Isn’t merit related to actions, not being?  When you love the child that is born to you, you are not calculating merit; you are acknowledging a glory that simply is (as per the goodness of creation in Genesis 1). In fact you are in the presence of the image of God. There is no assessing or measuring of God; where God appears (reveals Himself, even via image), when you are open to this revelation, there is no weighing-up being done; you have one response only. Awe. Awe of the divine.

The child just being itself, being and revealing what he is (which includes his relationship to the parents) draws out, without any resistance from the parent, without any qualification, the immeasurable love of the parents able to bring him into the world. Love is the response that attaches to that child, being drawn out of the parents by his nature.

That is the “kind of love” that John writes is “given to us” by God: the love belonging to the parent–child relationship (that relationship that, a few segments back, we saw imaged in another work of art).

TALK OF ADOPTION

You might ask, are we ‘adopted’ by God. I will, however, ignore the discussion we can find of this – as, for instance, when a Father of the Church says (writing of the recreation of man by the Holy Spirit),

“The Logos bestows adoption on us when he grants us that birth and deification which … comes by grace from above through the Spirit.”

Maximus the Confessor, On the Lord’s Prayer;
cited in The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox
Spirituality, ed. B. Bingaman & B. Nassif
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 156

I must ignore this because the entire matter of rebirth/deification by means of grace would have to be subsequent to what I have been looking at. There is a prior question, which is, Why should God care to restore us at all? Who are we, to Him, that He should provide any means of restoration or remaking (“through the Spirit”, through the Cross, or in any way)? – Evidently, we are already loved.

A parent has sacrificial love for his or her child.

THE WAY TO BECOME A PARENT

It is interesting to ask how a person becomes a parent. It is not really the same question as, how do you produce a child, as there are many people who do the latter but avoid the former. Creating the child makes you a parent in one sense, but for a person to be a parent requires acceptance of the child that he or she has created.

The central child of the Bible is announced in Isaiah, who speaks of both ‘birth’ and ‘gift’ (gifts are things to be received).

“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

Isaiah 9:6 ESV

In the immediate prologue, in the Gospel of Luke, to the very conception of Jesus we are given an account of Mary’s attitude to this event announced by an angel. Gabriel explains what will happen:

“And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.”

Luke 1:31 ESV

 Mary asks,

“How will this be, since I am a virgin?”

Luke 1:34 ESV

And her question is answered, in a way that she does not question but accepts.

“And the angel answered her, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy – the Son of God’.”

Luke 1:35 ESV

Her response to this event is acceptance, receiving the initiative of God and the child that is its consequence. This begins immediately, at the very ‘annunciation’ or announcement of these events, as she replies,

“Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word.”

Luke 1:38 Douay-Rheims

The child here accepted and ultimately received is inevitably loved.

I am asking, again, about the way to become a parent, thinking about God’s relationship to man as Father. Is it true that we are all children of God, loved by God in the manner of a child, simply for being? (This question is answered by Jesus in several different ways, one of which we examined last month in the parable of the prodigal son.)

I am suggesting that the way to become a parent is to say Yes, first, to the creation of the child – as, in the birth of Jesus, Mary did; but God “the Most High” did so as well, in initiating this (choosing Mary, sending Gabriel, etc.). Consider too that Jesus, the child born to them, is also the New Adam. It is the Gospel of Luke (which related the Annunciation but also the genealogy of Jesus, back to the very beginning) that calls Adam

“the son of God.”

Luke 3:38 ESV

God was the father of Adam, and with the birth of Jesus is a father again, yet in the birth of Christ there is a new creation, or creation is restarted, so as to rescue those who are lost to death, going all the way back to Adam.

“For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”

1 Corinthians 15:22 KJV

Why was this done except for God’s love of his original children?

God created Adam and Eve, accepting that they would go astray (which he foresaw). He created them accepting that, with the freedom that he wanted them to live by, they would choose what would kill them, and for love of them He descended to the earth as a human being, to rescue them. (To call them back to Him.)

We are all, all of us, children of God, loved by God in the manner called for by one’s own children.

BECOMING A PARENT, AGAIN

A last thought on this. I said that to become a parent is to say Yes to the creation of the child, but it is more than that.  Thinking of what creates a parent, think again of the adoptive parent. This parent might simply play the role of parent and do what a parent should, but he might in fact do more and actually become the parent – by seeing the child as his child. If that sounds like a pretense, as this is not his child, nothing at all is pretended if the father is in fact able to see what, in this child, elicits the love of the true parent.

An adoptive parent can see the qualities I mentioned at the outset (‘my child, given to me’, ‘no one else in the world …’, ‘miraculous’) and, in this experience of the child, has the vision of the parent, is the parent, through what this disposes him to do.

God, however, is not an adoptive parent but rather the true Father of every human being. We do not ‘become’ God’s children as God ‘decides to recognize us’ or ‘overcomes his rejection of us’; there is no such shift in attitude. We are created in acceptance and love of what we actually are.

When John writes that “we are God’s children now”  he is evidently marking a shift from before to after, but this is not a change on God’s part; he is talking about our own awakening to this relation of parent and child. In the same way as a guy who has a child with a girl is a parent in one sense (but refuses to be a parent in another, for not accepting the child he has created), that very child is a child in one sense (being created by that father) but is not a child in another. As the parent must accept the child to become that child’s parent, so the child must accept the parent as a parent to become that parent’s child. And it is possible for people who are wholly absorbed in the delights of the world never even to see God, much less see God as their father.

We know that we have natural parents but that we have another Father is not a thing we simply know; it is often quite hidden from us, even if we are believers.

Were someone to object that ‘God’s existence is never hidden’ (it is always clear to the rational mind that every person is born with), this just helps to make the point I wish to make. To discover the existence of God as creator is not at all to discover  the parental relation of God the Father of man. To know that some man you have never met is (causally) your father (being the one who impregnated your mother) is not at all to discover an actual father in the sense I am describing (that involves acceptance, knowledge of you, love, care). To believe in a creator God is not at all to discover a parent (God as that father that Jesus portrayed in his parable of the prodigal son).

That we exist in a relation in which God “the Most High” actually gives us the “kind of love” that a “Father” gives to his own children is a reality we must awaken to; we may not in fact believe this at all.

‘Just where is this love, this care that you are talking about? How is it shown, why don’t I feel it? Aren’t these just more of the reports of love that I can do nothing with –  the kind that I get on my birthday from my father the stranger, who never played a role in my life?’

The role of God the father, the part played by God in the life of his children, beyond dropping them into the world, is ordinarily hidden from people. But we cannot come into a relationship (cannot accept our own place as child) until the relationship has become visible, until we understand it to be real and true.

3 | A Biblical portrait

Of this painting by Anthony van Dyck, the curators of the National Gallery of Canada, which owns the picture, have written,

It has been recognized that the group to the right is a portrait of a specific family,

Myron Laskin & Michael Pantazzi, European and
American Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts
(Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1987), 99

a family whose identity has been lost. In this family portrait we have an image that links this family with a Gospel passage – an image that brings certain Gospel verses into connection with the contemporary world, as was intended by the words of Jesus that are in effect quoted by the image.

At one level the picture shows us a family in which parents bring their children to be blessed by Jesus, putting the children first (they are the ones shown blessed) as Jesus put them first in the Gospel passages invoked by the image. But at the same time we have an even deeper Gospel message relative to the parent–child bond just discussed.

The painting was created by Van Dyck around 1618–20, early in his career. Van Dyck became independent around 1616, joined the Antwerp painter’s guild in 1618, working in his teens as a gifted assistant to Peter Paul Rubens. He left to work in England for James I in 1620, returning to Roman Catholic Flanders after a few months. By the 1630s Van Dyck had become the leading court painter in Europe, rivalled only by Velázquez in Spain, a triumph cut short by his early death at just over forty.

It is known how he worked at the height of his popularity as a portraitist.

“He had a crowded appointment book and gave his sitters only an hour at a time, during which he made a preliminary sketch in crayon and painted the face. His assistants then filled in the outline on the canvas, and painted the clothes (provided by the sitter), while Van Dyck saw to the head and the hands, the latter taken from one of the models, male and female, whom he kept for that purpose. When his assistants had done their bit, the master would add the finishing touches. In this way he was able to work on several portraits at the same time and to complete them at the rate of roughly one a week.”

Keith Thomas, “Dressed to Impress,” The Guardian (14 February 2009)

In the early period in which our picture was painted, however, he may not have had that kind of assistance. At the National Gallery the painting (which is unlikely to have been given any title by either Van Dyck or its owners) is titled  Suffer Little Children to Come Unto Me. As this is a paraphrase of a Gospel verse, who these ‘little children’ are is also settled by the Gospel.

The related text is found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, passages that are really a lesson, the lesson we see depicted in the painting.

“Then children were brought to him that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples rebuked the people,….”

Matthew 19:13 ESV

As related by Mark:

“And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them, and the disciples rebuked them.”

Mark 10:13 ESV

It was the people who came to hear Jesus who brought the children forward: no doubt their parents – just as we see here, with a husband and wife bringing their four children to the seated figure of Jesus. (Jesus is settled, not ready to move; he ‘abides’ among the people.) Standing around him are three of his disciples, who just before the moment depicted by Van Dyck had “rebuked the people”.

What was their objection? Undoubtedly it had to do with their conception of what Jesus was doing: the kind of kingdom they took him to be proclaiming (the earthly kingdom of Israel, for instance) would not be accomplished by children. Children had no role to play in Jesus’ important business.

When Jesus saw the disciples preventing this bringing-forward of children he sharply – ‘indignantly’, we are told – corrected them, and Van Dyck shows us three disciples standing (ready to move on) around Jesus and receiving the lesson, showing expressions of surprised or rapt, open-mouthed attention.

“But when Jesus saw it, he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.’ And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them.”

Mark 10:14–16 ESV

The scene represented in the painting is just past that moment of rebuke, is that laying-on of his hands – in the 1600s. The reality he spoke of extends into the present: new people unborn in Jesus’ day need to be blessed, and are blessed, and in just the same way the correction of the disciples still needs repeating.

“Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven’. And he laid his hands on them and went away.”

Matthew 19:14–15 ESV

Some teachers of the 1600s, perhaps, still needed to learn that behaviour and attitudes that was dismissed by adults (How can any meaningful change come about through the docility and meekness of children?) is the behaviour that models possession of the kingdom.

4 | Cognizant children – who remove the blindfold of appearances

Things “revealed … to little children” are “hidden … from the wise” (Matthew 11:25, Luke 10:21).

What the passages linked with the painting tell us is precisely that it is children who model the attitude of those who possess the kingdom of heaven. It is remarkable that Jesus talks about owning the kingdom – “for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven”: not just entering it but having it as a possession (as a permanent home?).

According to the texts that lay behind the image it is the children who are the major figures in the family portrait. In their humility and reliance upon those they submit to they are examples to the adults. It is even the youngest that do this.

“People were also bringing babies to Jesus for him to place his hands on them. When the disciples saw this, they rebuked them.

(It is easy to imagine the disciples thinking that this is too much!)

But Jesus called the children to him and said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it’.”

Luke 18:15–17 NIV

A pivotal quality of the child is exactly that capacity to “receive”, and it is essential for us to add – so that we register what Jesus means by “receive” – without questioning. Fail to add this and you will not, I think, actually capture the meaning at issue in these passages; you may unconsciously reject it. – But, of course, the moment we add it we likely stir up the very kind of questioning that Jesus has put, itself, in question.

Nothing is implied here to the effect that questioning is improper, something that people ought never to do. Questioning is inevitable, and proper, in the life of a human being. But if, as Jesus tells us, things are “hidden … from the wise” (not for want of questioning but despite the questioning the wise are good at) – things that are “revealed … to little children” who do not question – then the path to possession of the kingdom requires the unquestioning reception of something given by God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit).

The boy here who is receiving, from the Son of God, the laying-on of Jesus’ hand is receiving a blessing, body to body. There is at least an echo in this of the Eucharist in the Mass. In Catholic Flanders the Eucharist was understood not as an act of remembrance but as an act of receiving that closes, in the present moment, the arc of transmission that was opened by Christ on the Cross: reception of the gift reaching through time into the present, bringing to those unborn when Christ died the new life His death offered. This new life will not enter unless received.

The healing released to all by Christ on the Cross is not effective if it is not accepted as … whatever it is (and it is not for us to settle this, presuming the power to decide what it is and is not). Surely ‘what exactly was offered to the world’ in that bizarre ‘blessing of the Cross’ is one of the things that is “hidden … from the wise”.

Everyone born is a child of God in the sense I began with: a beloved child, freely created and accepted by God, whom God also acted to rescue. But the ‘coming to Christ’ that we see in this image, to receive his hand, his body – this transmission of his ‘blessing’ – is an additional step of rescue by God, of “adoption” or gathering into the kingdom. The adoption mentioned by the Apostle Paul –

he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved

Ephesians 1:5–6 ESV

– is our recovery as his children, the restoring of a relation from which we had drifted away.

The kingdom turns out to be a home, which the children were fooled into leaving, in which children are received again into the family they belong to – if only they are ‘brought to him’, ‘come to him’, and “receive” him.

This family is the Church, but it might be good to forget the concept of the Church until we can understand how that body is a family: a community of love, giving and receiving, care, humility, and knowing and unquestioning trust.

5 | A family before Christ & the family of God

What you are seeing in images like the one at right, showing two figures beside the crucified Jesus – an image that was once very common in churches – is the Church as a family: the family of God. Though that expression does not actually appear in the Scriptures, what else is the meaning of these words in the Gospel of John, from the very scene of Crucifixion?

“When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold, your son!’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Behold, your mother!’ And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home.”

John 19:26-27 ESV

This is a passage that for a long time I ignored, passing it off as an interesting record of domestic affairs. To his mother Jesus says, “Woman behold your son” and to the disciple, “Behold your mother.” What is the meaning of these words today?

They meant a great deal to early Christians. In the “Gospel of John,” writes Fr. John Behr, “the theological Gospel par excellence,” you have already

“a theological interpretation of the event of the Passion…. Those who stand by the cross, and are not ashamed of it, receive [– that ‘unquestioning receiving’] as their mother the one who embodies the fertile, generative, faithfulness, and they themselves become sons of God”

John Behr, The Mystery of Christ (Crestwood, N.Y.:
St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006), 128

– that is, they go forth as renewed members of a family. Not just as people made by God (the human family) but as people newly received into a wealth of love poured out on the children, a love the children know of and receive.

In this passage of the Gospel of John, Mary (who has been presented in the Gospels as “one who is obedient to God, enabling the birth of the Son of God and opening the way for others” – Behr) is, as Jesus says from the cross, “your mother”: the matriarch of this new family defined at the cross. In a way Mary, here, is the first human being in the new line of descent following from her: that is, she is first as the first to say Yes to Christ, the new Adam, at the Annunciation.

At the cross she is given a new son, not through physical birth but again, we might say, by adoption:

“Woman behold your son,”

Jesus tells her. Who is this son? It is the disciple thought to be John, a disciple who has no connection to Mary by blood. What kind of son, then?

A son of the family that produced Jesus, a son who, like Jesus, will show the likeness of his true Father, only not just by who he is but by living and acting as who he is, in the knowledge of who he is.

Mary and John are singled out in this image as belonging to the kingdom of heaven – but of course we should say, as possessors of the kingdom of heaven, as people who will keep the kingdom as their home.

So, in this oft-seen image from the Gospel of John, involving a new relation of children and parents, Christianity is marked as a particular family, in which the parents are a father who is divine and a mother who, though human like us, is eternally blessed.

She is blessed like the boy in the painting by Van Dyck, who receives the blessing of Christ – as Mary received the blessing of Christ by humbly accepting what God, through the angel, proposed to her. In this way Mary displayed the humility and unquestioning that Jesus will single out as the childlike qualities that distinguish one to whom “belongs the kingdom of God”.

I am not aware that the scene, from John 19, of Mary and John at the Cross has a traditional name (as does the Annunciation). It appeared, however, in hundreds of churches, often as part of the choir screen

“A screen, often elaborately carved, separating the choir from the nave of a church. In England, the choir screen is called a ‘rood screen’, because it is usually surmounted by a cross, or [in Old English] ‘rood’. In byzantine churches, the choir screen, decorated with icons, is called an ‘iconostasis’.”

S.v. ‘choir screen’, in James Smith Pierce, From Abacus to Zeus:
A Handbook of Art History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 12

Wherever the cross was a statue of the crucified Christ, on Jesus’ right (our left) was his mother Mary and on Jesus’ left was John, “the disciple … whom he loved” (John 19:26), author of the Gospel of John (which emphasizes both the humanity of Christ and the family of the Church, the salvation offered to all).

And in elaborate rood screens (the two images above and the one directly below are a French one, at Albi), lower down below those two figures you see two more figures, set in direct relation with the two just mentioned.

Adam and Eve, the Scriptural antecedents of us all.

The idea is the one I have suggested above. The family of God is recreated, or re-begun, this time with hope. As Adam, “the son of God”, is the prototype of every man, Eve is the ‘daughter of God’ and prototype of every woman. What befell them has befallen us, but the Fall is not the end of the human story (as you see, for example, in the narration of history at Notre-Dame in Chartres, which moves from the beginning, on the darker north side of the cathedral, around to the brighter south façade and then to the culmination on the west; the pivot of that change is Christ, drawing to him the Church, those to whom “belongs the kingdom of heaven”).

As Adam and Eve are the old creature, the new creature is man remade, by awakening to his or her relation to God, joining with the family he or she is part of, and receiving what is given to those who come to ask.

“Ask, and it will be given to you; … knock [at the door of the kingdom], and it will be opened to you.”

Matthew 7:7 ESV

Churches once had within them this image of the Church and its members. Christ is the New Man, the man who in fact reflects the image of the Father, of whom Christ was begotten. Through him the two figures at the Cross form a new kind of family: a family bound by love, as in a flesh-and-blood family. It is a family whose members all possess the kingdom of God.

In these images on rood screens and on icons we see the renewed family turned to Christ, through whom they know the Father. It is again the Gospel of John that reports Jesus’ words on his relation to the Father.

I asked earlier, just where do we see the love of this invisible father.

“Jesus said to him, ‘Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else believe on account of the works themselves.”

John 14:9–11 ESV

We see in those images the renewed family turned to the self-giving Christ, who reveals the love of the Father; we see much the same thing in Van Dyck’s portrait of a family whose name we do not know.

But in this painting we have the additional element of the child, at the centre – or rather, at the centre is the relationship of Jesus to this child. Van Dyck’s portrait shows us a family turned to Christ, through whom they know the Father … but as a father. Through the reality of Christ (invisibly real), and “on account of the works themselves” performed by God, they know themselves to be beloved children. All of them. The “little children” of the current title includes the parents as well; the boy at the centre signifies what they all are.

In this family portrait the boy reveals several things:

•  our place in a divine family;

•  our beloved-ness, in this family, to the Father,

•  and the manner of laying hold of the kingdom of God, the lesson Jesus gives the disciples in the Gospel texts related to this image. We see this in the attitude of the son, here, receiving the blessing. Van Dyck’s painting is an image of receiving, unquestioning and trusting reception.

We might have been quicker to identify what the boy shows us, what the exemplary attitude is: it is faith (the boy’s hands), but then we would have altogether missed the fact that this is an image of receiving. (Our ability to read an image is often put at risk by what we know and are quick to say. There is a notable risk of purchasing the label and leaving the meaning in the shop.)

We are in fact being taught, by this image in its alliance with the Gospels, what faith is. It is receiving, trusting, not intruding questions that in this instance would mean non-reception, stepping out of the role of the child, disavowing the relation of child to father. It is this attitude, imaged by Van Dyck – this way of participating in the relationship to God – that is a sign of membership in the family of those who possess the kingdom.

Finally, it is truly remarkable how many of the elements that have been prompted by our look at this picture arise in the Gospel of John in Jesus’ prayer in the garden of Gethsemane:

the protection and care of the heavenly Father,
giving,
the kingdom,
knowing the Father as a father,
the relation of the Son and the Father,
the children of the family,
how those children behave,
their receiving of what is given them,
how, thereby, they have opened themselves to the truth,
how these children “are yours” (belong to the Father),
the state (the danger?) of being “in the world”,
the obliviousness of the world to the Father who cannot be seen as things in the world are seen,
the love of the Father for the Son.

Jesus says to the disciples who are with him,

“‘Behold, the hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each to his own home, and will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me. I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.’

When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they know you [– know the Father as a father], the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.

I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything that you have given me is from you. For I have given them the words that you gave me, and they have received them and have come to know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am praying for them. I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have given me, for they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I am glorified in them. And I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you.

John 16:32–17:11 ESV

It is possible to imagine the prayer that he prays next, for his disciples, as the heart of the prayer he prays in the painting, as he lays his hand on the heads of the members of that Flemish family. In fact he expressly extends his prayer beyond the disciples.

“‘Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one. While I was with them, I kept them in your name, which you have given me. I have guarded them, and not one of them has been lost except the son of destruction [– Judas Iscariot], that the Scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.

‘I do not ask for these only [– for the disciples alone], but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one [– participants in one family, living its life], just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe [i.e., through them, through how they live] that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them’.”

John 17:11–26 ESV

— FOR CALEB & SUSANNA
     & FOR K, V, N, & L

Artist
Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641)

Date
Circa 1618–20

Collection
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Titled there
Suffer Little Children to Come Unto Me

Medium
Oil on canvas

Dimensions
131.4 x 198.2 cm | 51.6 x 78 in

Photo credits
Pierre Grand | Flickr
Arnaud Gremillon | Flickr
Didier Kalensky | Flickr
Diana Markosian | Lensculture

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