82 Ancient Ideals
enlightenment. To be saved, we need to make ourselves open and
receptive in the manner of a child. We need to have faith that if we
risk loving our neighbors, we will receive love in return. When
the disciples try to keep children away from Jesus, he reprimands
them. “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them” he
says, “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” (Luke 18.16–17). He is supremely pro-
tective of them. “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of
these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great
millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the
sea” (Mark 9.42). The gospel of Jesus is a song of innocence— one
must throw off the false garb of experience and then strug gle, often
fi ercely, to maintain an open heart. Innocence has to be reclaimed.
It is not inconsequential that the Gospel relates the infancy of
Jesus. The man who turns up at the age of thirty spreading the good
news is, in his generous innocence, directly related to the child
born in the unprotected manger. The child is father to the man,
says Words worth, and, at least in the case of Jesus, it is so. In the
Gospels, the babe is the holy teacher’s true progenitor. Jesus will
always be directly related to the child visited by shepherds and
magi. In Eliot’s wise poem, “The Journey of the Magi,” the sages
from the pagan east, returning home, are never happy again in the
old dispensation, with their summer palaces, their sorbets, and
their dancing girls, having seen what they have in the stable. Their
de cadent world of Self has been disturbed by a child.
Jesus often surrounds himself with women— people who possess
no substantial power in patriarchal Rome or Jerusalem. And he
takes their part. When men are about to stone the women caught in
adultery, he utters the famous words: Let him who is without sin
cast the fi rst stone. Jesus understands that what ever the women may
or may not have done, it is not nearly so heinous as the righ teous