People are bringing children to Jesus so that he will touch them, and his disciples are rebuking the people who brought them. In this verse of the King James, suffer means allow. Jesus is saying, let the little children come to me, and he says it much displeased, to his own disciples.
And they brought young children to him, that he should touch them: and his disciples rebuked those that brought them. But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.
Mark 10:13-14 (KJV)
Allow, in the King James’s own English
The King James uses suffer for permission in places nobody misreads. “Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father,” says a disciple in Matthew 8:21, asking leave, not asking to be hurt. When John hesitates to baptize him in Matthew 3:15, Jesus says, “Suffer it to be so now,” and then John “suffered him.” When the man freed among the tombs begs to go with him, Mark 5:19 says, “Jesus suffered him not.” In Acts 16:7 Paul’s company tries to go into Bithynia, “but the Spirit suffered them not.”
The same word also means pain in the King James, as in Matthew 16:21, “suffer many things,” and pain is the sense everyday English has kept, which is why the verse sounds sad to modern ears. Here it is the plain sense: let them come, and do not stop them. The World English Bible prints Jesus’ words in Mark 10:14 as “Allow the little children to come to me! Don’t forbid them, for God’s Kingdom belongs to such as these.”
The anger in the scene
The scene does not start softly. The disciples rebuke the people bringing the children, and when Jesus sees it, he is much displeased. Mark sets the two reactions side by side so a reader cannot miss what caused what.
In the King James, Mark uses the same words for Jesus here and for the ten disciples later in the same chapter, when, in verse 41, they are “much displeased with James and John.” That is ordinary human anger, and Mark lets Jesus feel it, at the men standing closest to him. Matthew and Luke tell the scene too, and of the three only Mark says he was displeased.
One of the gentlest-sounding verses in the Gospels has a flash of temper in it, and the temper is pointed at his own friends. Grown men were told off first, and only then did the children get through.
Of such is the kingdom
The next sentence explains “of such is the kingdom.”
Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.
Mark 10:15 (KJV)
The comparison is about how the kingdom is received: the kingdom belongs to people who receive it the way a little child does.
Then he took them up in his arms
And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them.
Mark 10:16 (KJV)
Mark shows Jesus taking a child in his arms twice. The other time is in the previous chapter, where he sets a child in the middle of the disciples, takes him in his arms, and tells them that whoever receives one such child in his name receives him, in Mark 9:36-37. Matthew tells that moment at the start of chapter 18, the chapter that also holds “where two or three are gathered”.
Luke 18:15 says some of the children were infants. Some of the ones being kept back were too young to know it.
Who gets brought to him
The disciples in Mark 10 are not villains, and the text does not say why they rebuked the people bringing the children. It says Jesus would not have it, and that he took the children up in his arms.
The verse leaves a question for anyone near the door. Whom have we already decided should not be brought to him?