Mark 10:2-16

Some Pharisees came, and to test Jesus they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

Let me tell you a story: a children’s story that is also an adult story:

“The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another, his mother called him “Wild Thing!” and Max said “I’ll eat you up!” so he was sent to bed without eating anything.

That very night in Max’s room a forest grew and grew and grew until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around. And an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max and he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are.

And when he came to the place where the wild things are they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws till Max said “be still!” and tamed them with the magic trick of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once.

And they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all and made him king of all wild things. “And now,” cried Max, “let the wild rumpus start!”

“Now stop!” Max said and sent the wild things off to bed without their supper. And Max the king of all wild things was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.

Then all around from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat, so he gave up being king of where the wild things are. But the wild things cried, “Oh please don’t go. We’ll eat you up-we love you so!” And Max said, “No!”

The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws but Max stepped into his private boat and waved good-bye. And sailed back over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day
and into the night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him

And it was still hot.”
I’m telling this story this morning because it’s about a child. I’m telling you this story because today is St. Francis’s Day and it’s about the world of wild things. And I’m telling you this story for other reasons that I will try to make clear.

This story, of course, is the text of Maurice Sendak’s children’s book Where the Wild Things Are: Winner of the Caldecott Award and soon to be released as a movie.

Sendak, who is now 81, wrote “Where the Wild Things Are” when he was 34. He had already written and illustrated five children’s books, all of which drew in one way or another on his childhood, which by his own account was lonely and bleak. He was raised in Brooklyn by Jewish immigrants — a mother who suffered from depression and a garment-worker father who endlessly regaled his three children with horror stories about life in the shtetl, a small Jewish community in Eastern Europe before WW II, the kind of community that was wiped out in the Holocaust.

“Where the Wild Things Are,” as Sendak once told a reporter for The New Yorker in 1966, was a “personal exorcism,” and Max, the boy who runs away from home to rule over the wild things, was his “truest creation.”

At the end of Mark’s Gospel for today we are once again, among other things, listening to Jesus talkabout children. This is the second time Mark’s Jesus mentions children in the space of about 20 lines. The first time, he takes a child in his arms and tells the disciples that those who receive one of these (the least, the most powerless of these) will receive God. The second time, in today’s reading, over the objections of his own disciples, he again takes a child in his arms and first tells them that the kingdom of God belongs to one such as this and then says: “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”

Those of you who were here a few weeks ago when the first reading came around know that people of Jesus’ time did not view children as beings whose openness and imagination were a model for adult life. Rather, it was quite the opposite. Children were powerless, utterly dependent on their parents, their fathers in particular, and within their family systems were those who were most vulnerable to sickness, violence and abuse.

And so we are not given the option here of interpreting Jesus’ words about children as commending an idealized view of childhood to us in our Christian lives. Rather, as one Biblical critic says, the key to the interpretation of these Markan passages on children lies in abandoning the notion of child as a symbol and to be open to the child as person.

And so what we are asked to do is hard here, and I must admit to some reluctance to go to there myself. For it may mean that we have to look at what children in ancient times experienced, what we as children may have experienced and what children in our own times still experience. We do this not just to rehearse, or in some cases relive, stories of neglect, violence and oppression, but because these are the systemic things that Mark’s Jesus is challenging so vehemently.

Philosopher and psychoanalyst Alice Miller describes what can happen to children in some households and the cycle of domination and violence it can create. First, children, she says, can be hurt or neglected without anyone knowing. Then because they are children, they’re not allowed to react or to process the anger that understandably comes with neglect or hurt. They then tend to rationalize or idealize the parent’s intentions so that they can be interpreted as “good,” all of which leads both to repressing the painful memory and later as an adult discharging the unconscious anger either onto oneself or onto others who are powerless.

It is this cycle, a cycle that begins in households, that Jesus attempts to break open, insisting that God, our God, is not an angry, dominating father or mother, but is the one who has come to redefine households, societies and economies. This new redefinition he calls the realm of God: a challenging, counter-cultural realm which proposes both a family and a society that is about invitation, not neglect; peace, not violence, dignity and empowerment, not oppression. It is a realm that is good news for the powerless and the easily oppressed—for children, the poor, the sick and the outcast, and on this day, for animals, and the earth itself. And it is bad news for those accustomed to power. And as our Epistle reminds us, it is a realm secured by the one who was the “exact imprint of God’s very being:” the one who takes on the powerlessness of children in his suffering and death.

This last Saturday the Diane Rehm show on Public Radio was a call-in discussion of Where the Wild Things Are. Expert guests on the show and people calling in were all sharing their ideas about what the book was really about. One person said that the depiction of Max and his wonderful emotional range as a child was about the importance of all of us as children being able to give voice to the many different kinds of feelings we all have. Another person said that the story was about Sendak dealing with the wild things, the demons of his own childhood. Still another person commented that the book was about one thing: empowerment, a child being able to be a powerful person in a way that was safe. Finally, one of Diane’s guest’s a child psychologist said this: “In the end, it’s about a child being able to have it all and it all being alright. Even though he has been sent to his room without supper, he gets to the place of the wild things. In fact he gets to be the king of the wild things and in the end they don’t even want him to leave and then he gets to go home to the place where someone loves him best of all where his supper is there waiting for him, not a cold supper but one that is still hot. He gets to have it all—his feelings, his own power, the love of his mother and his hot food. He gets to have it all.”

God’s realm is the place where we and other who have nothing to speak of get to have it all—the humanity of our own feelings, human dignity that involves our own power, the love of someone who loves us best of all, and food that is still hot.

Sources Cited and Consulted

Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are

The New York Times: “Bringing ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ to the Screen” September 6, 2009

Diane Rehm Show Readers Review: “Where The Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak Wedneday, September 30, 2009

Ched Myers: Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus

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