Biblion Bible Commentary
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Even the Infants
Luke 18:15-17
15 They were also bringing their babies to him, that he might touch them. But when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. · WEB
Babies are brought to be touched, the disciples object, and the kingdom is defined by who is being turned away.
They were also bringing their babies to him, that he might touch them Luke 18:15.
The scene is told in the earliest account Mark 10:1–31. This telling uses a word for infants rather than children — the smallest, carried rather than walking.
But when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. The verb is the strong one, used elsewhere of silencing demons and storms. And their instinct is defensible: he is on the road to Jerusalem, he has just been teaching about prayer and justification, and this is an interruption by people with nothing to contribute.
Jesus summoned them, saying, "Allow the little children to come to me, and don't hinder them, for God's Kingdom belongs to such as these" Luke 18:16.
The placement in this Gospel is what gives the paragraph its force. It follows immediately on a tax collector who could offer nothing and went home justified, and it precedes a ruler who has everything and goes away sad. Between the two stands a row of infants who are not asked for anything at all.
Such as these is the phrase to hold. Not these are innocent — babies are not offered as models of virtue. What an infant has is need and no means, which is precisely the tax collector's position and precisely the ruler's difficulty.
"Most certainly, I tell you, whoever doesn't receive God's Kingdom like a little child will in no way enter into it" Luke 18:17.
The verb settles it: the kingdom is received. It is the one thing a small child is unquestionably competent at, and the one thing a man with standing finds hardest — which is the whole argument of the three paragraphs taken together.
settled What this mark means