Beyond Jesus: Seeing the Child (Mark 9:30-37 Sermon Notes)

Beyond Jesus: Seeing the Child (Mark 9:30-37 Sermon Notes)

Today’s sermon, based on Mark 9:30-37, explored the theme of “A World Where the Vulnerable Come First,” using children to poignantly illustrate the point.

The preacher defined vulnerability as a lack of recourse, a powerlessness. He challenged us to recover the radical hospitality of the early church: caring for orphans, widows, the sick, and the poor, even burying the destitute. Under Roman oppression in the first and second centuries, why this focus?

Because of Jesus’s deceptively simple logic: “Welcome a child, welcome me; welcome me, welcome God.” They lived this truth. A fascinating parallel emerged with Korean Cheondoism (formerly Donghak), the first religion to declare children’s rights, based on its core tenet: “Every child is a young Hanulnim” (God, in Cheondoism). Bang Jeong-hwan, who founded Children’s Day in Korea, was deeply influenced by this theology, being the son-in-law of Son Byeong-hi, Cheondoism’s third leader.

#It’s tempting to twist Jesus’s words, “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last” (Mark 9:35), into a self-serving ladder to success. But this misses the heart of it all. Jesus calls us to community, not to climb. He identified himself with vulnerable children: “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me” (Mark 9:37). Serve those you can see, not the unseen. Jesus, in his profound wisdom, knew striving to serve God directly often leads nowhere. He points to a child. See the child, not just the teacher—or you’ll miss the point entirely.