Mark 9:38-50
This morning’s passage from Mark follows directly on from last week’s gospel (vv.30-37), which ended with Jesus holding up a little child in his arms and telling his disciples that they must welcome one of these little ones, because it is if they are welcoming God the father himself.
Throughout Mark 8 and 9, Jesus has been attempting to turn the disciples’ thoughts away from human thoughts to God’s thoughts. To transform their thinking.
Now Jesus is not addressing the crowds here, but his disciples. He has snuck the disciples away from the crowd and back to Capernaum in order to teach them, yet they almost wilfully keep misunderstanding him.
Jesus says elsewhere in Matthew and Luke that ‘little children’ are not just very young people, but also represent the perfect, trusting, disciple. We are to have faith just like a little child because we are all God’s little ones; the lambs that Jesus commanded Peter to feed (John 21:15).
Now today’s reading starts with John interrupting this speech by Jesus and, calling Jesus “teacher”, then goes on to show he hasn’t been taught anything at all.
Jesus is trying to teach his disciples about humility and denying themselves, John interrupts Jesus to suggest that because the unnamed man healing a person isn’t one of the twelve, he should stop, despite doing it in Jesus; name.
John still thinks some disciples are better than others. He still wants to be the greatest.
Jesus is frustrated here I think, and we get the sense that he sees how little the disciples are listening and understanding his teaching. He offers multiple responses to explain all that is wrong with John’s assumptions about the unnamed healer from v.38.
First, Jesus emphatically states not to stop him. Then there are three statements that, in the language it was written, are all one sentence, connected with the word “because.”
Our translation, the New Revised Standard Version, for the sake of clarity separates Jesus’ words into three sentences, which misses this sense of exasperation. Perhaps a better way to read it is like this:
Jesus says: “Don’t stop him, because there is no one who will do a work of power by my name and then speak against me, because all who aren’t against us are for us, because all who offer you a cup of water based on my name, Jesus Messiah, which I have branded onto you, will not lose their reward. I tell you; this is the way it is” (my paraphrase).
I can almost hear him say, “Will you just listen to me and stop interrupting!”
Jesus now brings the attention of the disciples back to his teaching about the child where this speech started.
In last week’s gospel, he told them of the importance of welcoming the little ones; now he warns of what will happen if they put a stumbling block before these little ones.
Now the word translated, “to put a stumbling block before” in the Greek is Skandalon, where we get our word scandal. This is a scandal to God!
He uses repetition to hold together the point he is making as he talks about the cost of harming children – the lambs of God – meaning both little children and we who truly believe with the faith of a little child.
The repetition serves to drive home Jesus’ warning vividly. He begins with a clear, unambiguous and blunt statement. Those scandalizing the little ones who trust Jesus, deserve to sleep with the fishes, as Al Capone might have put it.
If you cause one of these little ones to stumble in their journey of faith, you might as well have a great millstone hung around your neck and be thrown into the sea. Jesus says that would be better for you than permanently spending eternity absent from God. That is what hell is.
Jerusalem’s town rubbish dump was in the Kidron Valley, outside the city gates of Jerusalem. It was known as Gehenna and was constantly on fire as the rubbish and dead animals were all burnt. We translate Gehenna as hell.
For the Jews, God dwelt in the temple, which is inside the city gates, so to be permanently excluded from Jerusalem for eternity was to spend eternity in hell. This is a difficult reading.
(I feel I need to reassure you that you can’t ‘accidentally’ end up in hell because you’ve had a bad day. We are marked as God’s own for ever.)
What Jesus is saying echoes what he said in Mark 8 about losing yourself in order to find yourself, but the metaphor has now become very real.
Jesus says to lose from yourselves, that is, cut off from ourselves all the parts of us that separates us from the life of faith, so as not to separate our soul from God.
“What does a person gain if they gain the whole world, but lose their souls?”
Jesus’ final point is made by linking fire with salt. Not the fire of the hell, but the purifying fire of the Holy Spirit. And it is in the salting of fire by the Holy Spirit, we have salt among ourselves.
Not just in us individually, but between us as sisters and brothers of Jesus himself.
Our Lord allows us to be salted with fire. He says, “everyone will be salted with fire” (v.49). Jesus is talking about all we who have come to believe. All of us are refined by fire, in the same way that gold or silver is purified or refined.
We too, are left without blemish and of immense value to the Lord.
This purifying (Gk: catharsis) leads us to be salted, or to becoming the ‘salt of the earth.’ Meaning we act as a preservative of the way, the truth and the life of Jesus himself.
This is the way of the cross, for there is no other way.
We season all our words and actions with this preservative, this salt. Not bland, flavourless, cliches about Jesus once a week in church. This is a very difficult reading!
When we scandalise these little ones, we prove that we have no salt. The thing is, we are all little children in the eyes of God. None of us will reach full maturity in our faith until God calls us home.
We create a stumbling block to other children of God when we fail to show the same forgiveness and grace that has been lavished on us by God in our Saviour, Jesus.
If we say we are Christian and act with unforgiveness and arrogance, unchurched people may think that God is like that, when he is the very opposite! God is constantly pouring out grace, love, forgiveness and mercy.
This is what is scandalous to God!
So we need to take the way be treat each other in words and deeds really seriously. Everything we do and say needs to build up the body of Christ, as we spoke about last week.
This fragile body of little children that God, in his infinite wisdom, has chosen to bring truth and grace, salt and light, to the whole world. Let me pray.