My God, My God, Why did you Employ Me? The Perils of Children’s Church | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

On Easter Sunday, we had the much dreaded all-age service, or “children’s church”. (No one wanted to miss the Easter service to teach kids, restless kids would make for distracted parents, so the Anglican compromise appears to be, pitch the Easter sermon to the kids.)

Anyway, the Rector read the familiar passage of Jesus’s death and resurrection, then questioned the kids, revealing, I thought, startling Biblical illiteracy, on their parts.

“What did Jesus do on the Cross?”

“He got off the cross?” suggested a boy.

Nope, this wasn’t the 21st century, and he wasn’t a tele-evangelist.

At one point, the Rector asked, “What did Jesus say on the cross?”

“In English, or in Aramaic?” someone asked.

“This is Oxford!” Charlie sighed. “In English.”

A clear, confident, perfectly enunciated voice rang out. “My Lord, my God, Why did you employ me?”

The church erupted in laughter, and I laughed the loudest of all. Here’s fodder for a dozen more funny children’s church stories.

My daughter Zoe, quite correctly, explained the significance of the veil of the temple being rent in two. Was rewarded with chocolate. Everyone clapped.

Afterwards, people congratulated me on my clever children, boths the “hits and misses.” Misses?

“Irene, did you answer anything?”

“Yes, but everyone laughed,” my puzzled eight year-old said.

A dreadful suspicion. Let it not be true. “What did you say, Irene?”

“‘My Lord, my God, why did you employ me?’ Wasn’t that what Jesus said?”

“No, Irene. That is what you would have said. Or I.”

Anyway, I am now trying to get us to study the Bible as a family Bible a bit more.

Biblical literacy is a treasure. The Bible a good book; references to it permeate literature; it’s wise, and hey, most of all, it’s true!