MK 9: 38-50 

Marginally Mark…Pentecost + 19…Revised 2018

We’re still in the context of Jesus having His arm round a child while He continues his conversation with the Twelve. Reminding us God intends life to be a continuing conversation with Him & each other - in humility!

I don’t remember singing it for a long time now, but an old hymn including the words ‘There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea’ speaks to me as to what our passage is pretty much all\ about. Add to this that God’s little ones come in all shapes & sizes & ages! If what Jesus says here is a bit scary, He’d rather scare us than have us exclude ourselves from God’s Rule by our ruling others out of ‘it’. What Jesus sums up in His last words here: “Have salt (= fellowship) with one another & be at peace with one another” are startling in their simplicity. And bring the flavour of Jesus Himself to our tables & into our lives!

The hard things Jesus goes on to say here warn us against making false assumptions about our own status in God’s eyes. Before we regard others as ‘outsiders’, beware lest our branding others as ‘outside God’s Rule’ is actually excluding ourselves! Jesus demonstrates, & wants us to understand too, that God is mind-blowingly, & spirit-blowingly, inclusive! 

Putting millstones round people's necks, amputating limbs, gouging eyes, consigning people who are not 'in' to Gehenna seems to appeal to a lot of religious hard-liners on the ‘religious right’ today. How about we encourage, by practising, some Godly ‘salt-sharing’ instead? How tasting-of-God are we?

If it bothers us, one explanation of the contradiction between what JES says here about those not against us, or not for us, & His being reported as saying the opposite in MT 12:30 & LK 11:23, goes like this: the former applies when Christians are on the ‘offensive’ in some way, & the latter when we're ‘under attack’. Perhaps there's no cut & dried explanation until some such situation arises & we have to work out Jesus’ meaning for ourselves? (It’d be stranger still, wouldn’t it, if there were no contra-dictions in the word-of-mouth transmission of what Jesus has said & done over so many years? Try asking our congregation, “What did I preach about last Sunday?” How many versions will we hear after just one week?

It’s important we do our ‘mighty work’, or give our glass of water, humbly, showing we're doing it in Christ’s Name. Not by big-noting ourselves, making ourselves out to be religious, or preaching about it, but by doing it. Not setting up a committee to do it, either! Committees can be, even unconsciously, delaying tactics!

Afterthought: Let’s not confuse living life humbly in God’s eyes with making ourself such a small target we escape others’ notice. Does that sound a bit like cowardice?

Brian