Ok,
so we’re still on that long road with Jerusalem, and as we saw last week, the
journey is like a road movie—or a road movie’s like this journey—and like a
road movie, it’s episodic, held together by the fact that they’re, well, on the
road,
and it’s held together by sometimes a pretty thin narrative. It’s as if Mark
had heard some of the stories about Jesus, some of his teachings, and connected
them together in a way that makes sense to him, in a way that fits the
particular points the author wants to make. And scholars think that that’s
exactly how Mark wrote the narrative, and you can see that especially well in
today’s passage. The paragraph before, which we talked about before, ended with
Jesus’ stunning pronouncement that whoever welcomes “one such child” welcomes him.
And though the next episode isn’t thematically related, at least on the
surface, it is linked by the phrase “in my name:” Last week, it was “Whoever
welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me” and in today’s passage it’s
“whoever does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil
of me.”
So,
maybe we ought to explore that phrase “in my name“ a little bit. These days, we
end prayers “in the name of Jesus Christ” and sing about “at the name of Jesus,
every knee shall bow” etc. without even thinking about it, but
historically—and especially in the ancient mind—the name of a person, place or
thing carried power. That’s why it’s no trivial thing when God lets Adam name
every living thing in the Garden of Eden—it symbolizes that humankind has real
power, power to literally aid in the ongoing creation of the world. You might
even say we are co-creators with the divine, albeit junior partners.
Today,
a lot of us don’t really believe that sort of thing, that names confer power,
but I wonder: might it be true? If we do something in Jesus’ name—invoking him,
it’s called—does it impart more power to the action, give it more ”oomph?” We
believe we draw on the power of the Holy Spirit in our work for God . . . does
it make a difference if we invoke the Spirit directly, if we call on its name?
I’m
not so sure it works like that, it’s a bit too much like a magic amulet for my
taste, too much like holding up a cross to ward off a vampire . . . but I do
know one way it makes a difference, and that’s when we do works in Jesus’ name
or the name of God and people see us. It’s like the person who wasn’t
really St. Francis said “Spread the gospel . . . in words if necessary.” When
we do our charity, our good works, if we do them in Christ’s name, and people know
it, we are spreading the Good News. We’re evangelizing. See how simple it is?
And we don’t have to knock on any doors or accost anyone on the street and ask
them if they know Jay-sus, either. (Not that there’s anything wrong
with that, you understand.)
Conversely,
doing something bad or wrong in Christ’s name is like negative evangelism, it
hurts the gospel. I don’t think the Christmas-day-1099 killing of 30,000
muslims in Christ’s name did the Gospel any good—for one thing, they have good
memories—nor does idiots in hoods and crosses stringing up black folk says
anything good about the savior, either. Any time anyone spreads hate,
intolerance and bigotry in the name of Christ, anytime anyone excludes someone
from church because of how they look or who they love, they do great harm to
the cause of Christ. And it pains me to say that even today, two millennia
after Jesus’ death and resurrection, there’s still a lot of that going down.
Anyway.
To the disciples in today’s story, the guy doing the exorcism in Jesus’ name is
drawing on Jesus’ power, and John—for once, it’s not
Peter—expresses their dismay: “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in
your name, and we tried
to stop him, because he wasn’t following us.” Ignoring the following us
thing—I don’t think anyone was following John —it’s easy to see
jealousy at work here, a desire to fence off Jesus’ power and keep it for
themselves. But you know what? There’s plenty of it to go around, Jesus grace
is abundant and, like the Holy Spirit, it goes where it chooses, even to folks
who aren’t tramping around Galilee in the disciples’ company.
And
of course, Jesus knows
this, and he tells them not to stop the guy, because nobody who’s doing deeds
of power in his name will be able to say bad things about him, which is
patently true, or he wouldn’t be doing them in his name in the first
place. The guy will be a witness for Jesus, he’ll be spreading the Gospel in a
positive way, providing what he’s doing is good. And casting out demons can hardly
be bad
. . .
It
kinda puts religious sectionalism in perspective, doesn’t it? I mean,
Christians have split for years into finer and finer cliques—called sects or
denominations—over finer and finer theological differences. Jesus says whoever
is doing good things in his name, leave them alone. Accept them as working for
the good of the Gospel. I wonder how all the fights—violent and otherwise—over
religious differences would have gone if Christians over the centuries had paid
attention to this? The split into the Eastern and Western Church . . . the
Thirty Years War, which killed a third of the German population . . . warfare
over different ways of being Christian, different ways of doing Christ’s work
have been distressingly common over the last two millennia.
Of
course, denominations spring from all of this as well. All you have to do is
look at a chart of splits within American Presbyterians to see this sort of
thing. I call them “spaghetti graphs,” because they tend to look like a tangle
of that particular pasta. In fact, our denomination has recently split over
issues like who can or cannot be ordained, or can or cannot be married,
creating another branch in the spaghetti logic of American Presbyterianism.
As
a matter of fact, Jesus says, whoever is not against us is for us, another
stunning statement, as Thaddeus the newscaster might say, and of course it’s
been popular over the years, embedded in the public lexicon, but is it
generally true? I mean, does it hold beyond the circumstances under which Jesus
said it? Well, human beings generally act like it isn’t, witness
sectarian violence, where folks cannot coexist because—on the surface, at
least, they practice different faiths. The prime example these days is the
crisis in Myanmar, where the Muslim Rohingya have been persecuted for decades
by the largely Buddhist majority.
Or
witness racism and homophobia, which almost by definition violate
Jesus’ dictum. We’ve all heard stories about some person or persons minding
their own business and being harassed by others because they are a different
color or a same-sex couple. They can be clearly not bothering anyone—or in
Jesus’ words, clearly not against anyone—and still be attacked. Humans don’t
have a great track record of practicing what Jesus preached in this regard.
Well.
If the first section of our passage deals with who is in Christ’s community—and
it’s typically inclusive, even of people who aren’t in the community—the second
section describes how to deal with one another within it. And it
sounds barbaric to our modern ears, proving that even Jesus was capable of
hyperbole. If any of you —the least of these he spoke about in the previous
section—if any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones, it
would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you
were thrown into the sea. And as we’ve seen before, what to put a stumbling
block before a person is to scandalize them, to make them lose their faith, and
that is a very serious thing.
In
fact, if your hand scandalizes you, if it causes you to lose your faith, cut it
off; if your foot causes you to lose your faith, cut it off; ditto for your
eye: if it causes you to lose your faith, pluck it out, ‘cause it’s better to
lose your eye—or your hand or your foot—than to be thrown into hell—literally,
Gehenna, the Valley of Hinom, where they burnt their garbage—where the worm
never dies and the fire never goes out. And though this is brutal language, we
shouldn’t forget that this is hyperbole—exaggeration to make a point—and it may
be metaphorical as well. It may be that Jesus is utilizing the common ancient
way of speaking about a social group as a body, with its parts—eyes, hands,
feet, etc.—representing members with various roles. And it may be an
exhortation to remove these roles if they threaten the integrity of the
community. It’s better to go without a seer, a prophet, than to be separated
from God. It’s better to go without a hand, without a worker, perhaps, than to
be separated from the source.
The
fact is, everyone
will be salted with fire, and salt is a preservative agent while fire is a
transformative, an alchemical one, so he is speaking of preservation
through transformation, through transmutation, perhaps. to a higher plane . . .
but if salt has lost its saltiness, its preservative power, how can it be
restored? If the community has lost it’s ability to preserve, its connection
with the Source, how can it season anything? How can it preserve anything if it
has lost its saltiness, aka that which makes it salt?
The
fact of the matter is that if we as a community—or as individuals—lose our
connection to God, if we are separated from our source, we lose our saltiness,
our preservative ability. Fortunately, we have that salt, that source
within, do we not? The same one in whose name we pray, the same one in whose
name we do God’s work, he is the salt that seasons, the fire that transforms,
and he abides in us—in is as individuals and communities—just as we abide in him. But though he
is deep within, closer than a thought, we are often separate at the same time,
we do not know how to access this divine spark. Rest assured, however, that he
is there, snd that we can call on him at need, if only we will believe. Amen.
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