Mark
9:38-50
It should be obvious, but I feel I
should say this clearly every time we read this passage: Jesus does not want
you to cut off your hand or foot or poke out an eye. Every so often a hospital will have a patient
whose mind has gone off into frightening and horrible paths, and who has
latched onto some of these verses, who decides that rather than fall into some
sin that tempts them, whatever it might be, that the preventive measure is to
harm his or her body. Let me assure you
that even someone who takes every word of the Bible as if it were dictated
letter-by-letter would not hesitate to say that these words are not to be taken
literally.
The hand and the foot may be used to
commit sins. Smash that windshield, grab
the package on the carseat, then run!
There are sins that begin with sight: David, looking down from his
palace, saw Bathsheba in her swimming pool and didn’t care that he was married
and she was married. Yet not all theft
involves break-ins and some theft is even accomplished through legal
means. Blind people fall in love, and
are also capable of forgetting themselves. Changing our physical capacity to
sin might eliminate some opportunities, but not the desire, and God, who sees
into the human heart, judges that. Jesus
said, after all,
“You
have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’;
and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.” But I say to you that if you are angry with a
brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother
or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you
will be liable to the hell of fire.” [Matthew 5:21-22]
By
those standards, most of us would be walking around without being able to
speak, because we would have had to cut the tongues out of our mouths.
What
we need to get rid of or to curb are the impulses within ourselves that lead to
the actions that our bodies and our minds carry out. That is an amputation that is far more
difficult, and probably more painful, than a once-and-done lopping-off of a
limb.
A
good example is what happened one day when the disciple John discovered someone
that neither he nor the other disciples knew had been going around and casting
out demons in Jesus’ name. Instead of
being glad for the people the man was helping, John just saw this as a sort of
copyright infringement, stepping on the disciples’ prerogatives, diluting their
special role and their unique standing.
He couldn’t stand for that, and so he took the matter to Jesus, probably
expecting Jesus to shut the man down for unlicensed use of his brand.
“But Jesus said, ‘Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of
power in my name will be able soon afterwards to speak evil of me. Whoever
is not against us is for us.” [Mark
9:39-40]
Chop! Sorry, John, but there went your need to
control anybody else’s ministry.
Oops! It looks like a section of
your self-importance was still attached.
Maybe another way to express it is
to say that some of the losses we experience are losses that we need to undergo
if we are to be whole, which is what Jesus was telling us. It’s better to lose whatever keeps us from
entering the kingdom of God in its fullness and wonder. The most difficult part of that is depending
on our own abilities and our own achievements, rather than trusting entirely on
God’s grace, and the more you have going for you the harder it is. Sometimes God goes to great lengths to get
through to us on that.
I like the story of Elijah that is
found in I Kings, where Elijah faces down King Ahab’s idolatry and stands up to
the way that the people have turned away from God.
“Then
Elijah said to the people, ‘I, even I only, am left a prophet of the Lord; but
Baal’s prophets number four hundred fifty.” [I Kings 19:22]
He
faces them down successfully and then when Queen Jezebel threatens him (and
this is a measure of how scary she must have been) he runs away to hide. Out in the desert, God speaks to him.
“‘What
are you doing here, Elijah?’ He
answered, ‘I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the
Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed
your prophets with the sword. I alone am
left, and they are seeking my life to take it away.’” [I
Kings 19:9-10]
Then
Elijah is told to stand on the mountain and there is a mighty wind, but God
does not appear to him through the wind, nor through the earthquake that
followed the wind, nor through the fire that followed the earthquake. Then came what the Bible calls “a sound of sheer silence,” and in that
“there
came a voice to him that said, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’ He answered, ‘I have been very zealous for
the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant,
thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life
to take it away.’” [I Kings 19:13-14]
The
Lord doesn’t respond to that, except to give Elijah his next assignment, his
marching orders, telling him whom to set up as the next set of kings and to
appoint Elisha as his own successor. And
then, at the end of the list, he lets him know, Mr. I-Alone-Am-Left, that there
have been seven thousand other faithful people in Israel that he either didn’t
know about, or wasn’t paying attention to.
The Lord was letting Elijah know, as
Jesus would later let John know, that the usual suspects may not be the only
game in town, and it would be a good idea to cut out the self-importance in
order to get a real sense of what is going on as the kingdom of God is growing
right there under his own nose.
We all need to be kept humble. Wise people may even know how to do it gently,
but effectively. Years ago, I was a
summer intern at a country church in North Carolina that had a very active men’s
group who met over breakfast one Sunday each month. One of the leaders was a wonderful guy, whose
name was Buck. He did, however, have
very clear notions on how to divide up any job and was quick to assign
roles. This one Sunday, I don’t know
why, but he overslept. The men were all
at church in the kitchen, but Buck wasn’t there to make the biscuits. Rather than have breakfast without biscuits,
somebody mixed up the dough. Buck wasn’t
there yet. Somebody else rolled the
dough out. Still no Buck. Then somebody cut the biscuits out and put
them on the cookie sheets. No Buck. It was getting late, so finally someone went
and called his house, because they had done as much as they could without him
and Buck and only Buck could put the biscuits into the oven. Ten minutes later, Buck was there, with the
sleeves of his pajamas sticking out of his shirt cuffs, and he stuck the biscuits
in the oven, gave permission for someone else to take them out when they were
ready, and went home again to get ready for church.
I’m
emphasizing pride in these stories, because that seems to be one of the issues
that Mark alludes to when he talks about John’s complaints. There are a multitude of other amputatable
(is that a word?) attitudes, like envy or bitterness or apathy or fear, that we
do far better without, and those, too, the Lord can take care of for us. Michelangelo said, “Every block of stone has
a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” I wonder sometimes if God doesn’t see us
blockheads that way: as wonderful works of his own art just needing to be
chipped away a little here and smoothed out a little there, with a major chunk
on this side that will have to go, but just the right grain over there to
reflect the light.
If
so, maybe we should be patient with the way that he works on us and, for that
matter, learn to admire the rest of the masterpieces-to-be that are all around
us.
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