A few Sundays ago, I was in one of the morning worship services at our church. It was a Communion Sunday, which I love. I deeply cherish Communion, and I try to give my full attention to the presence of God among us whenever I receive the bread and the cup.
On this particular Sunday, however, my concentration was broken as I prayed, waiting to partake in the bread that had just been given to me. About ten rows back, a baby started to cry. It was not a shrill cry or a scream. It was just the typical fussiness that little babies often have, and so the mother did not immediately remove the baby from the sanctuary. The baby cried for thirty seconds or more, and I must admit, I was a little frustrated. In my mind, I started criticizing the mother.
“Why can’t you just have some respect and take your kid out of the room for just a couple minutes,” I thought. “We only have Communion once a month, so why do you have to ruin it for everyone?” (Of course, I didn’t bother thinking about the fact that this Mom might want to receive Communion as well, and didn’t want to miss it because her baby was making a little noise.)
I tried to refocus my thoughts on Communion. I tried to think about the fact that God was present with us, and that Jesus came in the flesh, and how this ceremony vividly showed this. But, as I meditated on this, a thought came to me, “I wonder if Jesus ever cried in the synagogue as a baby?”
Now, I don’t know much about synagogue practices in the 1st century. I don’t know if children were present, or how old they had to be if they were. I don’t know if it was expected that crying babies be removed from the services, or if in those days parents knew how to keep their children better behaved. I really don’t know about that particular situation, but I certainly can imagine that there were sometimes babies present at moments when it would have been distracting if they were crying.
Of course, I can imagine Jesus crying as a baby. Many people don’t think about this, but it is important. I have often ranted about the worst Christmas song of all time, “Away in a Manger,” which celebrates the docetism we ought to be rejecting most strongly at Christmas time. “The little Lord Jesus no crying he makes…” On a holiday when we should be astounded by the mess, the pain, and the physicality of God becoming man and being birthed from a womb, we paint a picture of a baby who is so surreally peaceful, he hardly seems human. Once we realize that Jesus was not some super-baby, but was really, truly human, we have to start imagining what to many are unfamiliar pictures of him. God was a baby who needed to be fed every few hours, but could not communicate his need for food. God was embodied as a child whose only means of getting help was to cry for his mother. God went through development, and that probably means he went through phases where he couldn’t easily sit still for too long, even if he was in a worship service. It means at some point he was teething. He got colds. He puked all over Mary’s clothing. Other than sin, for Jesus to be human means everything that it meant for us to be human. That means he probably cried and fussed at awkward times, maybe even in a worship service, or while someone was reading the Scriptures. Perhaps he even cried during a Passover meal.
As I ate the bread, I realized, there is no incongruity in having a crying baby at the Lord’s Table. It should be a more vivid reminder of what I am celebrating. When we take the bread as a symbol of the body of Christ, we celebrate his incarnation, his humanity. Jesus took on the body of a baby so that he could one day give his body to his people. At one point, a child crying in a worship service was God with us. Or, in other words, there would be no reason to celebrate Communion, if God hadn’t, at one point, interrupted a worship service because he was hungry.
