[Jesus] tells his competitive disciples that this is how they should be: trusting, insignificant in many ways, dependent, open, receptive, ordinary. Children—the majority of people in the world—are the image of authority, of power, for Jesus’ community. Specifically, if we want to be the first, we must remain last and the servant of all—the servant, the one who attends to the needs of all, obedient, watchful, responsive even before being asked, doing what is expected and doing it faithfully, doing it with joy.
This same thought is one of the last that Jesus shares with his friends at the Last Supper, after breaking bread and sharing the cup with them. Even there the disciples end up in an argument:
A dispute arose among them about who should be regarded as the greatest. He said: “Earthly kings lord it over their people. . . . Yet it cannot be that way with you. Let the greater among you be as the junior, the leader as the servant. Who, in fact, is the greater—
he who reclines at table or he who serves the meal? Is it not the one who reclines at table? Yet I am in your midst as the one who serves you” (Luke 22:24-27).
The child image is Jesus himself, the servant of all—the one who washes the feet of his friends, the one who waits on the sinner, the one who sets off to seek the lost and carry them back, the one who sides with the poor and the rejects and the refuse of society. Authority is not to be exercised as power, but as service. Bending before the needs of people is not that far removed from bending before God in worship.

Megan McKenna, Not Counting Women and Children

Megan McKenna is an author, theologian, storyteller, and lecturer. She has taught at a number of schools, including Fordham University and the Washington Theological Union.