Mark 9:38-50, from Proper 21 (26)
This week’s Gospel passage reads like a game of theological Whac-A-Mole.
Jesus has just called the disciples’ attention to a child in order to chastise them for bickering about who would be able to pull rank on whom in the coming kingdom. Being first in the Kingdom of God, Jesus tells them, means being last in every way the kingdoms of Earth define power and prestige.
But in seeming oblivion to this point, John tells Jesus – boasts, really – about having put the kibosh on the ministry of a certain man whom the disciples had spotted casting out demons in Jesus’ name but who wasn’t a member of the Twelve. Someone who was, in John’s words, “not one of us.” Perhaps to John’s surprise, Jesus tells John and the rest of the crew to leave the man alone, because anyone not overtly against them is for them.
That’s one mole whacked.
But then Jesus is suddenly back to that child he had referred to a moment ago. Or perhaps children in general. It’s hard to say. Anyone who causes “one of these little ones” to stumble had better be on the lookout, Jesus says, because the resulting fate will be worse than being tossed into the sea while leashed to a millstone.
Whacked another mole, there.
Next comes some unsettling advice about chopping off one’s hand or foot or plucking out one’s eye if that’s what it takes to avoid stumbling in a way that might keep one out of the kingdom of God and land one instead in Hell.
Whack, again!
Everyone will be salted with fire.
No idea what that means … but, whack!
Then there’s something that sounds a lot like, “Stay salty, my friends!”
Whack!
And finally: “Be at peace with each other.”
Whack!
I really don’t know what, if any, idea links these rapid-fire, seemingly disparate verses, but Mark seems to be driving at some kind of point, because he has packed each of them into the interlude between the group’s arrival at the house in Capernaum (v. 9:33) and the group’s departure for Judea (v. 10:1). Given that Jesus’ explanation about his impending death seems to have precipitated things, perhaps that is the context, and perhaps what we see here is a frustrated Jesus desperately trying to tame his disciples’ chaotic attempts to understand the kingdom in all sorts of ways other than the unpleasantly true way he is trying to get across to them.
It’s not an exclusive club, guys. I love all of you, but not only you.
It’s not about rank. Even the waifs and street urchins are my children. Abuse one of them at your peril.
It’s not about gaining anything of mere Earthly value. Even if the cost were a hand or foot or eye, entering the Kingdom would be a bargain.
It’s not about appearances. You know how sometimes, when you buy that rock salt they mine around the Dead Sea, you get a batch that looks like salt but tastes like rock? Be the real stuff. Be salt. When the time comes, the salt of my Spirit will fall on you like fire.
Get along with one another. If you grasped what was coming, you’d see that you’re about to desperately need one another.
In the disciples’ defense, Jesus’ revelations about his unorthodox Messiahship must have been a lot to take in. They had seen him walk on water, calm a storm, multiply food, heal the sick, drive out demons and who knows what else. Peter, James and John have seen him transfigured into glory. Who can blame them for having a tough time with the news that the whole spectacular story would end – or seem to end – in his defeat and death? Who can blame them for raising a cacophony of alternative explanations and understandings?
We do the same, of course. We make this faith of ours about getting rich, or about acquiring political power, or about parsing who is in the God Club and who isn’t, who deserves our charity and who deserves to fend for themselves. It surely can’t really be, we object, about dying with Jesus to be raised into some alternative, unearthly life that is about submitting and serving rather than about winning and ruling. What kind of crazy, upside-down, no-good kingdom would that be?
Maybe just thinking about it panics us the same way it panicked the disciples two millennia ago, and maybe Jesus still finds himself whacking down at all the alternative interpretations we come up with.
Next week: Proper 22 (27)
